1. I was barked at three times today; once by a black standard poodle, once by a man, and once by a male mallard.
2. A female mallard (the mate of the mallard above) vigorously attacked my shoelaces while I waited for the bus.
3. A mob of at least twenty Japanese tourists in business suits took pictures of the mallard attacking my shoelaces, then of a bus when it rolled up to the stop, and then of both mallards as they strutted back and forth across heavy traffic.
4. I was yelled at by a bus driver for standing a mere three feet away from the curb as it pulled up. Didn’t I know it was dangerous to stand only three feet from the curb, even though that’s how far the bus shelter I was standing next to is?
5. My dog slept in her bed for most of the day, ignoring me even when I came home.
6. JamesandSarah, the evil upstairs neighbors, signaled their return at promptly 2 PM with screaming and crashing sounds after blessing me with only two days of peace.
7. As I was picking up various articles of clothing I had dry cleaned, a large mass of cigarette ash spilled out from the plastic bag covering my clothes, presumably coming from one or more articles of clothing. That’s funny, I thought I didn’t smoke.
8. While riding the bus home, a man sitting behind me “accidently” pulled on my hair because he “thought it was the cord you pull to stop the bus”. He didn’t get off for four more stops.

Who are you? Why are you reading this site?

“I think this should be present tense,” she told me, beginning to change the words without my approval. She was the special edition editor, and I a mere writer.

“Well, I think that’s a matter of personal style. I’m a past-tense person, myself. Also, present tense will make it sound awkward towards the end of the article,” I told her.

I watched bitterly as the blinking cursor chewed strong past-tense endings and left weaker present tense remains. I squirmed, causing the low computer chair to creak.

“Um… you missed ‘explained’- it should be ‘explains’, And ‘chops’ has one ‘p’, not two,” I said feigning impartialness. What I really wanted to tell her is that if she was going to bastardize my words, at least do it correctly.

“How’s that?” she asked after reordering the clauses in a sentence mid-way through the piece.

“Again, it’s a matter of personal style. I wanted the name of the bakery at the beginning because it stands out in the reader’s mind more,” I said. But I relented, straining my arm forward and pecking at the see-through keys to bandage the wound inflicted on my words.

“I don’t understand this quote,” she told me, reading aloud the sentence in question. It was a fair criticism, so I explained what it meant. “We need to add something there to fix it, because I really don’t understand it.”

She offered a long diatribe to clarify the quote, often rephrasing it mid-word as she struggled with wording. I saw the idea she had formed in her mind and wasn’t convinced. Finally, I pecked out something short and awkward which seemed to appease her.

“Look, I’ll just rewrite the tenses- you have a lot more to worry about. Just let me know about any major edits.” I said, the impatience and frustration seeping into my voice. As a fifth year senior majoring in English and Comparative Literature, how do you gently tell a mere college freshman what the difference between editing and rewriting is? How do you explain that people have different writing styles you need to consider when editing?

She laughed softly at something I had written. Well, at least she was enjoying my article, I thought darkly. Continuing to laugh, she changed the tenses to random words- missing others and increasing my bitterness.

At five in the morning, the fire department busted our door in because our neighbor is a dumbass. At first, when Tyler and I were awakened by the banging of what I presume was our door being busted in, we thought it was JamesandSarah being their usual annoying selves and making extreme noise at an ungodly hour. It’s happened before.

Anyway, here’s some photos of the sorry state of our door. I’ll write a more detailed account later, after I recover from the rage at the fact that our next-door neighbor caused this by taking out the batteries in all five of his fire alarms and by burning something so strong that it woke up one of the other neighbors who thought it was a fire. If I see that dumbass today, I swear I’m going to castrate him.

After six months of occasional run-ins on campus, we had a party. It was a pale tint of old times; good food, my one bottle of white wine amidst a table of red wine, mention of double dactyls, laughter, everyone talking about their lives outside of our month in a foreign land, and the periodic explanation on where someone was and why they hadn’t come.

Some had different haircuts, others different clothing sizes, but no one had changed.

There were shifting conversations. Everyone moved between the living room and the kitchen and then back again, making frequents stops in their endless journey to talk with those they passed. All the conversations in the room were the same. How are you doing? How is life? Where are you in your life? Have you heard from Person X since the trip?

After a month living together, after our only contact with home being one another, after being forced to survive together through both fun and stressful experiences, the only things we talked about were our mundane lives. It made me sad to realize how hard it is to connect with other people emotionally.

Never ask me what I think of the girlfriend you have been dating for two months because I’m going to tell you. Also, don’t expect me to sugarcoat the truth after complaining about how I didn’t warn you that the last one was Megabitchtron from Planet Hell.

Alison’s photo essay on the head is awesome. The sculpture reminds me of something that would have been mounted above the TV at the infamous Man Pit two years back. Or if there had been space, in their “Nintendo Bathroom” directly across from the toilet and right next to the game console. Of course, it experienced a much classier fate than it would have at the hands of my friends. The night they moved out, Dan, Jeff and Sean would have drunkenly smashed it to fragments in the back alley behind Scarecrow Video right beside the blue dino cookie jar and Frankencouch.

My favorite photos are 2, 7, and 13.

I’m working on a website redesign. I think.

I’m quite partial to the Mikania design I have right now, even though I can’t stand the asymmetric side boxes that I really want to be symmetric. And yet, I had an epiphany while eating one of the raspberry flavored truffles Tyler had brought back with him after staying with his family over Christmas. I took one bite into the decadent, and looked down to notice the shocking deep pink color of the inside and how it contrasted against the dark chocolate coating. I was also wearing a bright orange sweater at the time. Needless to say, the color scheme of a new website was born.

Whenever I begin working on a new design, I open Photoshop and play with the color scheme until I have the basic colors and their values. Sometimes things will change drastically later, but having the colors helps me to begin working on the actual design.

I’m also in the process of moving the mikania.com address over to a hosting service that I had signed up for awhile back. I’ve been too lazy to move everything over there, but I figure I’m wasting money on a space I’m not using. And I’m tired of looking at that ugly students.washington.edu address.

Lastly, I’m saying “good-bye” to Movable Type for now. Partly because my hosting service made it really easy to install WordPress, partly because I wanted to know in more detail what it looked like and how it worked, but mostly because I’ve found Movable Type to be too clunky. I’m not sure if I’m going to keep WordPress at this point in time, though. But for now, this will probably be the last post I write using MT.

Update: WordPress, you suck. I think I’m staying with Movable Type. Oh, and Cyberduck, you also suck. Do you think you could crash just a little bit more? I don’t think once every 30 seconds is enough. Maybe you should move it up to a crash every five seconds.

My new favorite thing to say really loud and at random intervals is “Hot donuts!” Originally, I just yelled “hot donuts!” and followed it with immediate cackling. However, I’ve recently fine-tuned my newfound expression. I now yell out in a hick accent so that it sounds like “hat donuts!” My mother hailed from Kansas and I hail from the former Cow County just outside of Seattle, so I’m really good at hick accents.

I love my new phrase so much that all Tyler has to do is say “hot donuts” once and I immediately begin yelling it out over and over again in my Cow County hick accent, much to the chagrin of whomever else is around. I find it sad that the only one who understands my inside joke is Tyler. It’s just not funny after explaining to inquisitive stares where the phrase came from. Most people haven’t even seen now defunct Sci-fi channel show, The Invisible Man, much less that episode. No matter how hard you try, private inside jokes just aren’t funny. Take, for example, yesterday at work:

Three co-workers were hovering inside the miniscule real-estate around my desk, all asking me at the same time why the project that they gave me just twenty minutes before hadn’t been completed. Yet another co-worker was leaning over me and talking really loudly into my phone, bumping my head with her ass, making me pray to the love of <insert god of choice> that she wasn’t going to fart in my face a second time (the first time has gone undocumented and will remain so due to the waves of terror it sends through my olfactory senses every time I remember it).

“Mindy, I need this phamplet done right now. I have to take it to be professionally copied.” “Mindy, someone said the hours for our <Name of Big Upcoming Event That Shall Remained Unnamed to Protect My Coworkers and My Job> wasn’t on our website. We need to update that, along with a whole truckload of other information that I want up before you leave in less than an hour.” “Mindy, I have some random project that requires hours of kicking the brand-new copy machine and cussing at it in German for you.” “HAHAHAHA. That’s so funny. HAHAHAHAHA. So you take debit cards. What? WHAT? I asked if you take DEBIT CARDS.”

The chatter was unbearable, especially since I sit at the main reception desk and the building was designed so that everything on the first floor echoes up to the energy efficient skylights and then off into a random void of nothingness. This makes it nearly impossible for me to decipher anything anyone says unless they’re standing right in front of me and no one else is speaking. If more than one person even speaks on the main floor at the same time, the noise ratchets in a jumble of gurgles and growls around the reception area and manages to mysteriously increase in volume before echoing upwards towards the skylights. Of course, need I remind you that I am also leaving this job in two months? Everyone I work with is also painfully aware of this. Hence, my treatment has been slightly better than that of a washed up prostitute with a stretch-marked stomach sagging from beneath that tight and faded leather corset she found on the discount rack. But I won’t focus on the bad things about my job- especially not the poor treatment I’ve received lately after my over four years of dedication and hard work.

Needless to say, my frustration was fairly high at that moment, and bubbling up even higher. I felt like I needed to whip out a machete from the folds of space and time and begin brandishing it wildly, smashing my piece of shit Dell computer and threatening to take on the copy machine if they didn’t quiet the ruckus down. The machete didn’t appear when I wished it would, so I reacted in the only other way I could think of.

“HAT DONUTS!” I yelled loudly above my co-workers’ bewailing. The words echoed upwards towards the skylights, twisting into a more volatile hick accent in their hollowness.

Everyone stopped and stared.

They no doubt think I’m a bit insane now, but I still have my job for two more months. Furthermore, this just proves how well I fit in there and how much they’re going to miss my indispensable presence. I mean, really, anyone who can fart in their co-worker’s face and not even acknowledge their evil deed is just as deranged as someone wants to smash the computer from hell with a machete or who yells “Hat donuts” randomly.

I now leave you with my hack job of a screen capture: the point during the episode “Tiresias” of The Invisible Man when Hobbes says, “Hot donuts, eh!?!”

Awhile back, I put up a petition to release the Pirates of Dark Water on DVD. Sign it. I know you want to.

If you don’t know what the Pirates of Dark Water is (or even if you do), Andorus’s Pirates of Dark Water Page is an awesome resource.

P.S. A meaty, stick to yer ribs post is in the works. A few are, actually. I’ve been in an inspiration/time/procrastination slump. Basically, I’ve been writing plenty, but all of my resources had been disappearing into the soul sucking appendage of the UW’s illustrious student newspaper. Recently, I’ve been on a break from their evil and homework and searching for a decent job have taken over. I have exactly two months of school left.