MOOP!

Having an off-IM day, for reasons of holyshit final project due tomorrow that I've not worked on anywhere near enough.

Also, cleaning my room, using a pretty rocksome version of the Flylady swap-activities-every-twenty-minutes strategy. Hopefully, this will make me actually accomplish things. Hopefully.

At any rate, a relaxing thing for me to do in one of my break sessions would be to do a SundriesPost. So that's what this is! And since the alarm is about to ping, I don't think I'm actually going to work on it for nearly another hour. Oops.

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SUNDRIES!

*From Liss at Shakesville, the awesome line I don't know there's ever been a White House appointee whose picture once hung on my bedroom wall.

*Apparently, women report higher satisfaction and pleasure levels when they use lube. You know, from the "no shit" department.

*This is a poem. If you can pronounce every word correctly, you are probably a native English speaker. And I really want to memorize it, simply because I like the English language. I think first I would have to learn how to pronounce all the words in it though...

*From McSweeney's, The "Snake Fight" Portion of your Thesis Defense.

*Speaking of awesome poems, here is a retelling of Poe's The Raven that is also a mnemonic for remembering pi.

*So, a couple months ago, my awesome friend zombie_dog and my awesome acquaintance hermitgeecko wrote an IF adventure called One Eye Open, that did pretty kickass --third place in this years IF competition. If you don't have time or ability to play, but want to see the game, apparently a group did a collaborative run-through, scoring five of the nine endings. Yay!

*The final image from this scans_daily post is now my background. Best. Background. Ever.

*Oh, speaking of good things cool people I know have done, Dogboy and Justine made its kickstarter, and is going to become a real play! I am excited for this!

*One of my friends from Squares has decided that her current hobby is folding gorgeous connected chains of origami cranes. I covet, both the talent and the end result.

*So, I missed actually sundriesing about it, but there was this AH-MAY-ZING tumblr called Privilege Denying Dude. Which then got taken down due to wanky copyright issues from the stock photo bought for the project and omfgdramas or something like that. BUT! Apparently a really cool dude said "You can use my picture! I don't mind because I am able to check my privilege!" and now there is Fuck Yeah, Privilege Denying Dude.

Ohman, and I was looking at the dude's tumblr, and here is the post! He sounds like a pretty sweet dude. If I ever meet him, I will have to buy him a cookie or something (if he likes cookies).

*Again with the Shakesville, Liss made a post about these ridiculous Russian anti-abortion ads. And I must be a bad person, because all I can think is "I am so going to start appending "IF I'M BORN" to the end of every sentence that even makes the slightest bit of sense. If I'm born."

(Okay, actual thoughts, the ads are pretty apalling --especially the "I will make you happy if I'm born" one. I'm sorry, I know at least two separate people who hate the fact that they have children (not the children themselves, but that they did not want them and were forced to anyways) and far more than that of the sworn childfree type. If I got preggers tomorrow, I would vastly prefer abortion to raising a child who would have so many issues from mommy resenting it changing her life so drastically¹.)

*Um, so, apparently some German scientists (not of the ostracized or diabolical or mad variety) seem to have cured AIDS in this one dude using stem cells. This seems like it could be...good.

*How To Stop A Geek In Their Tracks. I admit it. I'm not seriously into any of the fandoms, and I sputtered I was so discombobulated.

Kay. I need to go achieve more things now. Room-cleaning, at the very least, but I told myself I couldn't do my 750words for today until I had a third of my physics project done --and I am not breaking a 150 day streak. Ta!

~Sor
MOOP!

1: Knowing who I am and how I cope with life, I would resent that child. I could love it, and want the best and be as good a mom as I can, but I would still never be able to stop hating the fact that I had to sacrifice my life to that of my child. I'm sure many women would be able to, and have, raised well-adjusted children just fine under similar or more drastic circumstances, but I just could not do that. Maybe someday, but certainly not right now, not while my freedom is still so much the most important part of my life.

I signed up to write 750words a day for the month, forgetting that this is honestly a relatively boring month, even for just straight up journaling. Today I went to the doctor's, played Dominion, and antagonized my sister. Woo.

So!

What should I write about?

Besides my hair, I've done that already.

~Sor
MOOP!

'Cause I always get paranoid when it's been a few days and I haven't updated. You all are gonna forget about me and never love me again!

Spent the last handful of days largely not on the computer. Yesterday drove up to Pennsylvania by myself in order to hang out with Lauren and Emily (best friends from college) and their friends Ty, Rob, and Kim. The five of them were in town for a Herp convention, meaning I walked into a hotel room containing three or four snakes, half a dozen geckos, and a tortoise.

It was a fantastic set of adventures, both the driving for hours alone (very fun, though I need a way to dictate thoughts so I don't just scrawl reminders on scraps of paper like "purity groups"¹ or "fuck teal cars"²) and hanging out with the five of them. A lot of it is the way we hang out, but I get something with the twins et al that I don't really get in the rest of my life --that feeling of being college kids home for the summer and just faffing about and having adventures. Perhaps because Veronica and I don't go out as often as hang out inside? Dunno.

I also managed to listen to something like four and a half or the mix CDs I made when I first had a computer and music, and determine that, while I had awful taste in music, it wasn't *too* awful, and my inability to make a good mix tape is not recent. Also, Sk8er Boi? Really 14!Sor?

Also, cows. Lots of cows. And awesome hills that contained roller coaster terror as I started down them at a whopping thirty-five miles per hour. And Olivia (our GPS) winning a fairly major battle in our war of hatred against each other.

So that was that, and this is crazy meandery, isn't it? That's okay sometimes.

Anyways, I spent three days ago hanging out with Veronica and Jeremy, which included a secret mission to V's house for bagel bites, and involved us gossiping until midnight or so, because that's how we roll.

Two days ago, there were seven teenaged girls sleeping in our basement, leading to terror. And them facebook-chatting their crushes, which made me go "aren't you supposed to call them instead?" At least there were no bras in the freezer the following morning.

And that's more or less been my life recently! Need to go work on either my 750words or Month at the Museum application now. Ta!

~Sor
MOOP!

1: This is a reference to a new way of doing purity tests, by sortof crossing it with Never Never --everyone writes down five or ten scandalous things that they've done (ideally not super-specific, so "made out on top of the Empire State Building in a Thunderstorm" is not as good as "made out on top of a skyscraper") and someone complies it and everyone takes this combined purity test to find out who's the least pure. Or whatever it is you do with purity tests.

Look, if *you* have a day with six hours in a car without anything else to do but sing loudly, you start to get a little goofy too!

2: meh, I was closely tailgated by like...three teal or blue cars in a fifteen minute span or something. Forget hatin' on the red cars, teal cars are JERKS!

I get very mellow and silly when I drive by myself. I also call people and laugh about how lost I am.

We went to Cedar Point today! YAYAYAAYAYAYAYYA!

For background, I have wanted to go to Cedar Point for *many* years. I like roller coasters a Damn Lot, and the idea of being able to go to...well, the mecca of such rides was deeply appealing to me.

And was it good?

Oh great ghu god YES! I could tell it was going to be a fun trip as we got close enough to see the park, and I found my face glued to the window, a smile brightening the car. I may have giggled madly. Okay, scratch that, I definitely giggled madly, I may have drooled. But only a little! And hey, you would drool too if you saw roller coasters tall enough to require aircraft warning lights.

Once inside, I acquiesced to my sister's request, and we charged to the backmost corner, to try the swings. They were nowhere near as nice as the ones at Navy Pier, but we enjoyed them anyways, and then could get on with the very important business of ROLLER COASTERS YAY! Collecting mom (we had left Nik in the arcade), we did the WildCat (something mom figured Alys, who likes a very soft sort of coaster, could enjoy) and us two wot actually enjoy this madness headed across the way to try the Iron Dragon.

The Iron Dragon was such a delight we had to grab Alys and do it again, assuring her she would not freak. After that, it was time for me to split off. There was a sensationally tall blue structure calling my name, and I would've been fool to ignore it. And so, bravely ignoring the sign declaring a near-two hour wait, I got in line to ride the Millennium Force.

It was indeed 300 feet high, and with an 80 degree sheer drop, and damn if that wasn't fantastic, especially from the front row (There are some things in the world that I have the patience and stubbornness to do right, roller coasters are absolutely one of them). But once I touched ground, I determined that I was ready for shorter lines, and so I refound my mother --"what's good?"

"Well, Blue Streak is a *fun* coaster. It's little, but it packs a whallop."¹ And so we prance to the front of the park, and I fell entirely in love.

Seriously. I rode that coaster six times. Three times right then and there with mom, and three more times at the end of the day. It's worth noting that I spent less than ninety minutes total at that ride, and had two or three instances where I ran around, got in line, and got in the first available cart without any waiting. Heavenly short lines? Sure, happens all the times on the wuss coasters. But as it happens, mom was one hundred percent right.

This coaster was *fun!*. Old wood, made in '64, and with drops that made your stomach drop out and sent shivers down my spine. Riding in the very back of the coaster was a special treat --you really did have points where you would swear you were weightless. An amazingly good coaster.

In between riding that one repeatedly, mum and I slunk off to go try the Mantis --my first ever standing up coaster. It was getting late enough that the weight was under an hour (unheard of for one of the big-name coasters) and we had a lovely walk through the line, bonding and chatting and such. The coaster itself was lovely, with lots of big loops and going upsidedown, and a drop half as high as the Millennium --only this time, at dusk, the view for miles was studded with twinkling lights. Beautiful!

It did make me realize that I have Absolutely No Problem with going upsidedown in coasters. This isn't really surprising --anyone who knows me well, has probably realized by now that I like being upside down, hence my concentration on learning how to handswalk better, and my fondness for using patches of grass to practise cartwheels and round-offs and handsprings (and ariels when I feel up to them, which is damnably not often enough). But it was nice to not at all care which direction I was --of course, the logical next test is to find a coaster that hangs you upside down for the majority of the ride --that would be a hoot!

And then was the end, and I drove us to Dennys and a hotel. Tomorrow we eat breakfast with Dad's little sister and her family, and then drive drive drive and somehow end up back in Columbia.

I cannot wait.

~Sor
MOOP!

1: Heavily paraphrased

Postscript: That's day one of the August Challenge down. Good luck to Dog and Sparr and anyone else giving it a go.