elomire

Listening to Postal Service isn't necessarily the best thing to do on the early morn of V-day. One of course wishes that that acronym was victory day instead of valentine's day, but we're stuck with valentine's day, which can be the best day or the worst day of the year depending on what one's significant other status is.

For some reason the most depressing thing isn't that I totally think that the girl that I totally have a crush on here probably doesn't have any liking for me at all, rather it's that the bars and clubs here have no idea what even semi-decent music is. I'm seriously at the point that I'd kill to even hear Backstreet Boys over the obscene constant barrage of hip-hop that they play. How can anyone dance to that shit?

I really miss Riverside and Los Angeles, they were large enough that there were places in which I belonged, but here it's all pot, hip-hop and lumberjack fashion. I feel like I'm utterly crazy for deciding to stay here. Even SF is 280 miles away

Anyways I'm sure everything I'm saying here doesn't make any sense.

Well I mean this isn't the longest I've gone without updating this.. There was this one time that I didn't update for a whole two years, and that post turned out pretty awesome. I mean I said, "post meridian" in it and I mentioned soda fountains, which are quite delicious. Although I really wish I kept with just drinking diet sodas and ice tea, jezzus such poundage has been accumulated since I stopped that. Though it's not like I haven't lived with a fuckton of stress in the past year and a half. And they took away Diet Berries and Cream Dr. Pepper, what wrong with you Dr. Pepper people... and no Diet Cherry Dr. Pepper, while delicious is no substitute.

And if you can't guess, I'm angsty. Though who writes anything on LJ if they aren't angsty? I mean I'm an orphan now, I think I'm allowed. Although on the other hand, besides people constantly dying on me and a giant zero in the love life, my life has actually been pretty awesome. I got into graduate school at Humboldt State for the spring, when the CSUs totally shut down admissions for the entire system for the spring. It took a ton of string-pulling for the math department to even get my application even considered. Then I get handed a TA job, that gets me a good bit of money plus fee waivers, and a desk and an office...

Oh and get this.. I have a car now. Yeah... me. I did get it for free, in a sort of way that I'm entirely not happy about because it was the third most worst thing that's ever happened to me. It's funny how these things entire encompass the 1.5 years from June 2008-December 2009, all three horrific things. But yes, car. It's okay, it saves me on trips to the grocery store and enables my horrible eating habits, so it can't be entirely bad, and it's almost the only time I get to listen to podcasts now too.

Well it's just unfortunate that this post is clearly much more emo and much less cute than my previous long absence returning post, but I think overall these past years have made me much more emo and less cute. It's hard because I really do want to be that fairly perky goodnatured kinda happy person that I was. I haven't really been happy for quite a long time now, and now that I don't have any reason to be down I hope that I can learn to be happy again.

Ugh.. I spent about $316 buying my math books for the Fall and this is buying them all used and at crazy cheap internet sites. If I had decided to be insane and buy them at the HSU bookstore they'd've come out to $740. What is it with math professors who decide to pick books that are all over $120 new? I know there are cheaper books that more people recommend for those areas. Bleh..

Anyways if anyone's interested I actually narrowed down what I'm taking next fall. So it's:

Advanced Linear Algebra
Numerical Analysis
Real Analysis
Advanced Calculus
Statistics and Probability
History of Mathematics

I'm signed up for a 3 weekend course on Mayan Hieroglyphics as well. That should be fun. Hopefully I'll still be able to take it, but since I'll need to get a job as well I don't really think I'll be able to. :(

I'm really slow at updating anything here, but I messed around with my theme and changed the name of the journal to something more mathy and one that matches the domain name I hooked it up to.. but of course LJ's domain aliasing instructions are quite obscure so I don't know if I'll get that working.

But anyways. I saw the 6th Harry Potter yesterday and well.. it was crap... Actually the worst film of the series. Seriously David Yates is a hack and Warner Brothers should be bombed for not taking up Alfonso Cuarón on his offer to direct. I wasn't exactly expecting much out of the film considering how much I disliked Order of the Phoenix which Yates also directed but I figured maybe he'd do better with the strongest book in the series (Half Blood Prince), but instead he produces an even more disjointed emotionless movie. Instead of focusing on the meat of the story in the film, the Voldemort flashbacks and the end battle, he instead focuses on the teen romance portions of the book which really got tired fast. I do understand why he was tempted to do that since Twilight made some serious bucks but several times I was about to throw my drink at the screen hoping that it would knock out Lavender Brown. I know that I probably expect wayyyy to much from the films but blah.. maybe if Prisoner of Azkaban wasn't such a wonderful film then I would just accept that they'd all basically be meh films. But I mean ugh.. When Prisoner can feel like a so much more menacing and dangerous film than Half-Blood Prince when Prisoner is the only movie that doesn't have Voldemort in it and HBP shows the dark days after he's risen and revealed himself you know something's wrong with HBP's film maker. To give Yates credit, the film is utterly beautiful to watch but most of that is due to Cuarón re-styling of the series in Azkaban which Newell and Yates aped.

Oh well... Here's hoping that 7-1 and 7-2 are much better films, since there's much less material in the 7th book and it's being split into the two films. I'm hoping for Goblet of Fire level of competence but I'd still be pretty happy if they were at least was better than 5 and 6.

To illustrate this is my scale of movie Harry Potter goodness:

Prisoner of Azkaban
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Goblet of Fire
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
The Sorcerer's Stone
Chamber of Secrets
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Order of the Phoenix
.
.
.
Half Blood Prince

Yay! Elaine has her british voice again!

On the other hand I am not excited on the looks of Monkey Island 1: Special Edition or Tales of Monkey Island. Why they couldn't just take the Monkey Island 3 look and make it HD I have no idea... ugh..

But I am on the whole excited. I thought MI4 had killed the series, and I will love to replay MI with Armato playing Guybrush.. I think if anyone Telltale will treat the series right.

Well I never knew that Galactica was in truth the Golgafrincham Ark Fleet Ship B. That was an interesting finale. And wasn't the whole Laura-Student thing just creepy?

I hate you December, ever so much. Why can't we just have November 2?

Anyways this December has been treating me fairly well until today, when while I was cleaning the screen of my Macbook, the screen cracked. As far as I know I wasn't applying too much force or oddly distributed force, I was just cleaning it like I've always cleaned it. Here's what the screen looks like now...



So yeah.. now I basically have an oversized Mac Mini with a backup power supply.. Well at least I'll have some money to replace it from the aid money when I get up to Humboldt and I have my Dad's laptop also.. So it's no where near the worst thing that could happen. But it just goes to show.. never start trusting that a good December will happen or it will sneak up behind you and break your stuff.

Anyone who wants to help protest the passage of Prop 8 and get the word out about civil rights there'll be statewide protests this Saturday.

http://jointheimpact.wetpaint.com/page/California

I'll be at the one in Eureka and there are tons of locations. Even one in Riverside.. So get out there and let your voice be heard.

Also if you know anyone who voted Yes on 8, hear them out. Listen to why they voted the way they did. Because a lot of us had thought we had this in the bag, and to open people's minds and hearts we have to know why they voted Yes.

Big picturewise we know the myriad reasons but it's different for every voter. Most of it probably comes down to a simple fear of someone fundamentally different, and so we have to go into education mode. We have to let people see that because someone is homosexual they aren't any different fundamentally from anyone else and that they deserve the same dignity that everyone else receives. We need to teach people the difference between state sanctioned marriage and church sanctioned marriage and how gay and lesbian people getting the right to marry won't affect their churches and who they marry. And honestly we must concede the fact that yes, schools will teach about gay marriage if marriage is brought up and some people won't like that. But people must be reminded that schools teach about the world and they aren't endorsing gay marriage merely taught that it exists and some people do that. Like any honest sex education class must teach about homosexuality as well.

I can not abide this decision, this proposition that people who love can not marry. Seriously WTF CA? No matter how much other people say that it's a silver lining that 48% of people are pro human rights that still means that 52% of what most would consider the liberal bastion of the United States consider it okay to strip rights away from people who make them squeamish. And honestly in my opinion those who vote for taking away the fundamental rights of other people do not deserve those rights themselves. And those who incite the mob to strip those rights away are inherently evil. You DO NOT strip away fundamental rights already constitutionally given. What group is next? Atheists? Muslims?

There are quite a few people and organizations that have a high responsibility for this outcome. The No on 8 and Yes on 8 campaigns of course, the LDS Church which was the major contributor to Yes on 8, the Knights of Columbus as well. The Yes on 8 campaign ran the dirtiest campaign I have ever seen, practically saying we'd indoctrinate elementary school children to be gay (as if that'd be a bad thing). They had no respect for morality and human decency and flew the flag of pure hatred while masking it in holiness and sanctity.

And the No on 8 people let them get away with it. We never set the tone of the debate. We should've bitch-slapped those assholes back to the 20th century. They had no solid ground to stand on. We should've run ads that directly linked this battle to interracial marriage, we should have shown ads that asked what rights are these people going to take away next. We should've gone on television and called a spade a fucking spade. We should've called out the backers of the prop as bigots who were trying to force their hatred down California's throat and would do anything they could to convince and scare a civil-rights loving state like CA to hurt one of its most vulnerable groups. We should've linked their current bigotry to past bigotry that those backers fully endorsed. But instead we didn't call them out and merely tried to refute the points they brought up while believing in the decency of California to pull through. Which in the end was a losing proposition.

But there is still some hope. Prop 8 might still be ruled invalid by the courts. Today the ACLU brought a lawsuit to the CA Supreme Court stating that the Proposition should never have been on the ballot since it revises the constitution rather than amends it. And a Constitutional Revision must be passed by a 2/3 majority of the legislature before it can be put on the ballot as a proposition. Now it would be a revision since the constitution's equal protection clause is now interpreted since May 15 to give protection to a person's sexual preference and also because marriage is considered a fundamental right of all Californians. One can not merely amend the constitution to strip away a fundamental right from a protected class without changing the equal protection clause. So fingers crossed that the court throws out this piece of hate from our constitution.

But it still might not restore my belief that we Californians believe in the rights of our fellow citizens.