chain mail replacement

I'm writing this here and not on Facebook, because I don't want to participate in chain mail and tag 25 people afterwards but also don't want to disappoint the three people who have tagged me who obviously care so much about me (hehe).

1. My mother taught English. This has made me keenly aware of other people's grammar mistakes and super embarrassed when I make them myself. It bothers me that I am quite bothered by other people's mistakes--well, at least some of them. Just so you know, "number" and "amount" are different words. "Few" and "less" are, too. There should always be a comma before "too."

2. I have never desired to be a real banker, but, when I was younger, I had my own pretend bank. I made my own currency, checks, and log books. I printed weekly statements for my family members and allowed them to make transactions. The bank even had an awesome logo and a slogan I can't remember.

3. I have never had a pet. Assorted family member's allergies and aversions prevented it. My grandfather had two cats that my brother and I named. Then one of the cats jumped at my brother and created a huge gash in his neck. That was the end of us hanging out with the cats.

4. I truly enjoy learning. I can usually listen to people to talk about things that interest me for a long time. On the other hand, three hour classes usually only retain my full attention and interest for at most two hours. Additionally, I do not wish to be a writer of any sort and have only two or three times in my life enjoyed written assignments.

5. I did not have cable television until the middle of third grade. While that seems pretty early in life, I think much about me is related to the fact that I pretty much only watched PBS for those formative years. On family trips, Nickelodeon and Nick at Nite were the Coolest Things Ever. Once we got cable, classic television was all I watched until much later. Hogan's Heroes is still my favorite show, closely followed by Adam-12. I have seen every episode of Hogan's Heroes at least three times. I would totally be able to watch the same episode a few times in a row and each each viewing.

6. It is a little weird to me that I love prison movies, but I do. My favorite movie, not just in the prison genre, is Escape from Alcatraz with Clint Eastwood. This is, in large part, the cause of my love of Clint Eastwood, not due to my love of Clint Eastwood. My second favorite is Papillon.

7. I hate washing dishes. It also amazes me how easily I make my apartment incredibly messy, when I am a generally organized person.

8. I do not know how to ride a bike.

9. I have had a fireplace in my apartment both this year and last and never used it until right now (Sunday February 1st, 7:58pm). Unfortunately, it is not a real fire place. The logs are fake. I do not like that. Also, the flames are blue. There is not much heat. The logs will never burn down. The fire will never end, unless I turn it off. What the hell? That is not the correct fire place experience. I don't like the sound it makes or the unsafe feeling it gives me. It also took my building three months to turn it on. Ridiculous.

10. I really like cooking. I would be more than happy to cook you dinner, if you help me clean up after.

11. Ella Fitzgerald once serenaded me in an elevator.

12. This one should be obvious by now: I love the work of Raymond Chandler. For the most part, I also love movies based on the work of Raymond Chandler.

13. I painted a portrait of him recently. It's the first painting I've done in a really long time. This makes my mother really happy, because I used to be very into art. I almost went the whole art school route. But, in the past four years, I haven't done much art at all. My mom thinks I am wasting talent. I think I have the skill but not the ideas.

14. I enjoying drinking gimlets. I am not sure what percent of this affinity stems from my love of Raymond Chandler and the first book of his I read, The Long Goodbye.

15. I bought a harmonica and would like to be able to play it well. I have not yet dedicated any time to this task, however. Hopefully spring break will bring greatness.

16. I am finally going to Coachella this year. I am most excited 'bout Leonard Cohen. Sometimes I call him Lenny Cohen, like we're friends. We're not, but I have met him at a Christmas party. Sorta met him. More like too nervous to say anything other than hello. (OH MY, SO COOL).

17. I frequently think in song titles. When someone says "alley oop" at a basketball game, I first think of the song by the Hollywood Argyles, not the offensive maneuver usually involving a slam dunk.

18. I think James Franco is an okay guy but am really disappointed he is going to be the commencement speaker at my graduation.

19. I don't think participation should be so highly valued by professors. This pressure to participate causes people to say things just for the sake of getting those participation points and not because they have anything valuable to say. I cannot count how many times classes have been ruined because of idiots 'participating.'

20. My usage of the word idiot reminds of an interesting twenty minutes spent in an urban planning class a year or two ago discussing all the words related to city. In a roundabout way, idiot is one of them. See if you can figure out how.

21. I have a headache right now that is distracting.

22. I will watch any Huell Howser show. Even though I am way into them, they frequently are very helpful if I want to be sleeping. I will spend over five bucks (ridiculous) on a quart of Broguiere's milk if Huell Howser's face is on it. In my defense, it does taste better than most other milk I've had.

23. I really like Jewish holidays. I am going to have a seder this year at my apartment on the third night. You might be invited. Let me know if you would like to be.

24. I don't know why I didn't think of this one sooner: I really really really like postcards. I keep every postcard I get. I also, in general, like writing and receiving letters (not just the fake ones I write on this blog).

25. I do a lot of things for the future, which sometimes seems really silly to me but I like it anyways. For example, I took a yearbook photo and am buying a ridiculously expensive yearbook when I graduate, because I am really into my grandmother's college yearbooks and want to have one for my eventual granddaughter to find. This way/philosophy/appropriate-noun-of-which-I-cannot-think-currently has caused me to be quite the pack rat.

Disservice

To whom it may concern,

If I call/email/chat with you for any of the following reasons:

• my computer suddenly loses all sound
• you charged me for wireless internet with included router but did not send me a modem/wireless router
• you don't tell me that the price of the service is actually the price after a mail-in rebate, which won't be applied until four to six weeks after you received the filled out rebate, which I won't even receive until over a month after service begins
  

Please do not thank me after every step of your mind-numbingly repetitive process. Please do not call me Ms. Laura. If you deleted both of these horrible things from your script, we could solve problems much more efficiently. Seriously, all of the following were stated just for "Bert" to tell me that I need to reinstall the audio driver for some reason which he does not know.

Bert : Thank you for confirming.
Bert : Thank you for the information.
Bert: Thank you for the information.
Bert : Thank you for your efforts inchecking all the information.
Bert : Thank you for the information.
Bert : Thank you for the information.
Bert: Thank you for confirming.
Bert: Thank you.
Bert: Thank you for your time and patience.

And now, to especially you, Verizon, please do not tell me you can not give me my money back (for your, of course, incorrect charges) because you have not yet generated the bill when I have the bill in my hands. And when I tell you I have the bill in my hands, don't just ignore that and move on like there is no such bill.

Also, Micaela, please learn how to speak English. "Just to confirm, is the music files are same on external hard drive earlier also?" Huh?

Best,
Laura

Chandlertown.

I was planning on going to sleep after I wrote the previous post, but then I looked out my window and through the shades I realized it was already getting to daylight. I had class at 11am; it was going to be way difficult to get up if I went to sleep then. I then had the genius of idea of going to up to my roof to watch the sunrise--gots to take advantage of my apartment before I move out!

As expected, it was beautiful and calm. I finished reading my most recent of Chandler novels, The Little Sister.

"I smelled Los Angeles before I got to it. It smelled stale and old like a living room that had been closed too long. But the colored lights fooled you. The lights were wonderful. There ought to be a monument to the man who invented neon lights. Fifteen stores high, solid marble. There's a boy who really made something out of nothing."

Birds were chirping, sun was rising. All was great--until a bee landed on my leg and I sat there perfectly still. eek! Anyways, I went back down after the sun was up with all these great plans--cooking a full breakfast, watching an old movie, and even getting some work done before class--but I ended up going to sleep anyways at 8. And, now, it was even more difficult getting up at 10 for class! But it was worth it.

I just started a book by Edward Thorpe called Chandlertown about Los Angeles. Check it out in the sidebar links.

Roommates and Supertramps

Sometimes I wonder if my roommate thinks I am as crazy for watching so much Murder, She Wrote and Law & Order as I think she is for watching so many Lifetime Movie Network and what I like to call Judge Phil (Judge Judy, the People's Court, and Dr. Phil).

I know dandelions are, but I am have no idea about this pretty tree.

In other news, I am in the process of (intermittently) reviewing my notes for tomorrow's biogeography final. My professor, by the way, is basically David Hasselhoff as a lacrosse athlete who for some reason ended up studying geography in China. Anyways, several weeks ago we learned about "supertramps"--species that spread widely and easily. Oh, Professor Zackey!

Edit: Upon some quick googling, it turns out that the "supertramp" was coined by the one and only Jared Diamond, the UCLA professor who makes his students write essays to get into his classes. According to Wikipedia:

The name was coined by Jared Diamond in 1974, as an allusion to both the itinerant lifestyle of the tramp, and the then-popular band Supertramp.

This is kinda hilarious.

Wet Ground

Dear landlady,

What's the point of having a pager when you don't call anyone back very immediately at all? My apartment is leaking and I am for sure going to wake up from being electrocuted, since the water* is leaking into an outlet next to my bed and you aren't doing anything about it (Plus, now I am sitting in the dark 'cause I don't want to plug my lamp into a wet outlet). I mean, I put towels there, but if it rains again in the middle of the night that ain't gonna be enough.

Get your act together,
Laura

*Greg Ruben would be happy if it was freezing cold, 'cause then he could fulfill his dream of having an ice skating party in my apartment.

I am listening to Neko Case so loudly that I didn't realize it was raining.

I am so excited about this rain! Going to make some tea in the morning and get the gas for my fireplace turned on (Although, I am still disappointed that is a gas fireplace and not a real one. sad). Speaking of gas, I spent two hours today preparing foods for a Chanukah dinner. Two hours! Making latkes which I don't even like just because one needs latkes at a Chanukah dinner. And then, thirty minutes before people are supposed to arrive, my stove top won't turn on! So I knock on the doors of the two people I know on my floor and they don't answer. So I end up cooking latkes in some random people's apartment (and to continue the running motif of recent entries, they were watching Law and Order while I was doing this, although it was SVU of which I am no fan) and it was super awkward. And because of this awkwardness, I rushed the cooking and they weren't so fab. Bah! At least the salad was delicious. haha.

As promised to some folk, what follows is an awesome documentary made for the BBC in 1972 called "Reyner Banham Loves LA" which I first watched in my Los Angeles in Film class freshman year. It is spectacular. Please note the Shaft-esque music. Also, I am in the process of reading Banham's Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies and I highly recommend it.

"And you might wonder what I am doing in Los Angeles, which makes nonsense of history and breaks all the rules. Well, I love the place with a passion that goes beyond sense or reason."

A few things that bother me.

This is not at the Auto Show; this is at the Seattle Art Museum.

1. My parents won't get me a car (nor can I afford to get one myself) but decided to make the Auto Show the post-Thanksgiving family activity. A little cruel, I would say.

2. If you are going to have something be entirely about Christmas, don't call it "holiday." It's not more politically correct or some nonsense because you call it 'holiday' when you don't include any other holidays in it. To be clear, I don't care if you only care about Christmas--just don't call it 'holiday' and get me excited about the prospects of just maybe there might be something about Chanukah!

3. My landlord is never in her office.

4. My blues professor looks like a mixture of David Dassa and my dentist. WEIRD.

there's a particular alley

I am just finishing up an essay about castrated boys in Italy singing opera in the 18th century. So exciting, right? Too bad I am really not interested and definitely disgusted. Right now I am listening to bossa nova and jazz greats like Joao Gilberto and Thelonius Monk; I sure do love Monk. Turns out, Summerschool is lame. Also turns out, however, that I know this and yet continue to enroll in it quite frequently. It seems that the thought of taking four classes for three quarters is much more frightening than summer school. Yet, I have now spent some weeks studying opera and feminism and partially-castrated sexually-promiscuous Italians and a runonsentence of more things I don't care about, and perhaps I would have been better off taking four classes a quarter.

I went to my new apartment on Thursday to measure it and drew up little floorplans for the two rooms, split into the bedroom, closet, living room area, dining room area, kitchen, and library nook. I am going to have a library nook! There's this really random area created by some weird walls so I am going to put bookcases covering the walls plus a table for my record player and an old antique lamp I rescued from my grandmother's garage. This is right next to the kitchen, which is kinda weird, but whatever--it's a library nook!