It's like the first time you ever used a computer, everytime!

Whaugh. First off, just to vent, I'm starting to feel overwhelmed. I'm not entirely sure if it's because I do in fact have twenty things to do in the next three days, or more so because I hate perspective drawing. It's boring, predictable, and deals with math. More so, working with perspective makes me angry, and then I feel angry about a seemingly poor reason to feel angry, and thus the cycle continues until I'm this little ball of upsetness fueled entirely by rage and caffeine and don't actually get any of the million things I have to do done because I'm angry, and then I get more upset because I have so much to do. It's like the krebs cycle, (this is biochemistry speak for cycles that keep being fueled and producing products which turns the cycle faster and makes more products and needs more fuel). Seeing as how it does generate life it must continue, and I'm still angry. Yup. Go figure, me, upset about something. Gah.

Maybe this is going to be my little space to vent some of the wackiness of the cycle until it goes away. Oh, and I think that ignoring my email will help too. yes, I have to do that for a while I think. Maybe until I stop getting emails.

But on with my main complaint today:

You've heard of the cola wars, I'm sure. It's basically the same product that are seemingly different, enough to be annoying and spawn those taste test booths in the mall, but not really enough to make you care, aside from getting a free drink. Well my problem today follows along the same lines.

I've always been a science student, and quite happy as one. I'm told what to believe and the way that things are and simply accept it. Alright, so breathing air is generating free radicals that could kill me, I may not be alright with this, but I have to accept it and continue to breathe. Now, suddenly realizing that I was greatly lacking in the whole 'arts credit' type courses, I've dove into the wide world of exploring concepts that are not tied to facts, but opinions, feelings, and whatever a big spot of paint on a white canvas is supposed to symbolize. It makes very little sense, the good news is it's hard to be wrong, but harder to know when you're right.

Through my unknowingly deceptive ignorance to this 'East' side of campus, I've gone the past four years with the good computers, the nice hallways, the big and thick 'get what you paid for in weight alone' textbooks, and the overall lack of hopeless students. It was great. There was always an IBM with the proper keyboard, all of my music videos at my command, and an email that worked. But I've crossed the fine line that I figure falls somewhere around the Powerplant.

Yup, here they use things like 'Macs' with their blinding whiteness, and instead of labs every five feet, there may be a modest one every five buildings. There are students in the halls, get this, reading for no particular reason aside from enlightenment alone, and without calculators. The buildings are old and run down and there are these 'stairwell' things I'm still struggling to get a handle on.

The most disturbing of all of these facts are the computers. Not only do the keyboards feel funny, but trying to navigate the system is near impossible and guess what?!? Nothing transfers! Woot. They have programs like 'toast 6 titanium' and Fugu in addition to a crapload of i... programs. What do these things mean? Where is word? No, instead after a navigation adventure you can come up with something called TextEdit. What the crap is that? And then there's the whole annoying scroll bar that some how senses your presence and changes sizes and scrolls through what I can only attribute to mind control. The screen works the same way, instead of buttons you kind of move your hand near it and sometimes stuff happens. Argh! Yes, I do realize that it's a better system, or at least claims to be, but I like things stupid and inferior with my 'Hey, Captn' Helmet, click here to type' rather then navigating though something called Zinio.

There's also no cntrl key, well there is, but it does something entirely different and instead you have to use the squiggley apple key for the normal kinds of stuff and the others are simply in the same spot to... you guessed it, make me look like I just figured out that nifty trick called fire as random windows open and close and Practica Music goes on about how it's so great.

In short, I look like an idiot everytime I transfer systems because I can't even figure out how to turn on the stupid thing or -gasp- open the cd drive (FYI it's a button on the keyboard). In conclusion... you are so cut. That is all.

It's like the batmobile, but seats seven...

Hey, kids, ready for some good old timey fun? Maybe you want some action and adventure and came to this blog to find it? Well you won't, but you will help boost my people counter to ONE THOUSAND! That's right, I've exploited one thousand people by having them spend ime viewing the absolute crap that I type, wasted their time and in turn delivered no compensation. Ah, life is grand. Today, though, I do have an idea for some good activities that you can do at home, so long as you are parentally supervised, and don't run with scissors. Instead simply throw them far into the air in the general direction that you want to go and then run real fast and catch them before they land.

'Twas a while back when I decided to make a list of things that I wanted to do on campus before I left. Yes, I realize that many of you have graduated, but for some bizarre reason still show up, especially for coffee, so this planning is still feasible for you. I guess you could also somehow modify it to include things to do before getting fired or being thrown out of the house, but in my case it's a little something I like to call school year resolutions, not to be confused with New Year's resolutions that exist only to be broken and reflected upon with shame.

The first step is to keep these things simple and universally timeless. For example, make it something that you won't regret in a week, like getting your hair styles a la flock of seagulls or painting large Amazonian women on the side of your parent's minivan. This may seem like a good idea, but trust me, it just goes downhill from there. Writting a literary masterpiece, as a converse example, does not fall into this category, and with the current trend, so long as you talk about some magic wand crap, people will eat it up and you can spend your days being delightfully introverted while making all of your clothes out of bills that are in such a high denomination, they will be invented for you exclusively.

As for being simple, it's a good idea to keep your ideas to under five or six words. Coming up with a plan to dominate all of the western world through a plot involving telekinetic gum and bowler hats may be a good idea, documentation should be kept to a minimum and in a separate folder from the rest of your list. Through this you can continue on with you planning without having to be worried about discovery and the inevitable revelation of your plot by some idiot do-gooder wearing their underwear outside of their pants. Yup, in short, you'll be showed up by a jerkface and people will laugh at you behind your back.

Try to keep the number of items on this list low and thus feasible. I'm not telling you to draw a blueprint for the fine line you wish your life to follow because of the danger of one of two things occurring. Either you'll (A) fail miserably and as you will not meet your lifelong goal to climb all of the mountains of the world, occupy all the slots in the New York times top ten bestsellers list for at least six months of the year, complete five simultaneous doctorates while creating a neverbefore studied sixth faculty that you will also obtain a doctorate from, and finally start your own wombat farm, and most likely due to the repetitive stress and feeling of loss and failure, you'll live alone, in a cave, and collect toenails (not your own); or (B) you'll finish everything, but by the time you do, you'll have missed all of the spontaneously wonderful stuff that normally would happen to you along the way. Both would be bad, and you only have so long. SIMPLIFY... be a hippie.

Still have no idea what I'm talking about? Can't read? Here are some ideas, my personal examples, with shift-8 stars so that you can at least be amused by the somewhat developing pictogram of this blog:

* Run a candidate
* Obtain a tuition-worth of free stuff
* Destroy all bathroom ads
* Attend three biochem classes consecutively
* Write a Gateway comic
* Ridicule and destroy the Gateway
* Become the university president
* Find that truck I lost

Hey, hey, hey, I completed two of those already. But it's a simple-can-be-done in a term kind of list, yep, most importantly it gives me something to procrastinate about and that alone makes me feel busy and thus successful. If I just sat around all day and watched TV or played Katamari Demacy I would feel pretty useless. However, if I sat around and watched TV or played Katamari Demacy while in the midst of attempting to become the president of the U of A - voila, instantly I become useful and seemingly productive. It's also a good idea to fill your list with things requiring minimal effort, like aging, then no matter what else you succeed or fail with, you are still a guaranteed winner, or at least wiener.

The Golden Helmet Awards 2005

Hey, here's an idea, don't watch really sad music videos when trying to type something comedic. I just finished viewing Simple Plan's 'Untitled', and people die. Looks like I'm going to have to track down some Beastie Boys... hold on... alright, I'm going to try 'Bad Day' by Daniel Powter, great, their throwing in some hurricane footage before. Yup, fantastic. I mean why can't people just be happy? Oh, and now 'the video I requested isn't available'. Super. So I killed the internet. Sorry everyone, but it's dead, thanks to me.

Despite thoughts of suicide after the sadness internet has brought me, I'll trudge on and continue with my critique of society...

The stage has been set, the red carpet, well is a black rubber mat... wait, it just needs to be flipped over, and the parking lot, is um, going to make a lot of insurance companies very upset, that's right, from Edmonton it's the 2005 GOLDEN HELMET AWARDS!

While most award shows, um, nevermind, it's actually just like the real ones and rewards stupidity, but in this version, I'm going to focus on drivers that make the roads just a little more special for everyone, you know the ones, you see them everyday, out on the streets, in the parking lots, and facing the wrong way in drivethroughs... I'm one of the people that give them cars. Woohoo.

First up: trailer hook-up. Yes, we rent trailers, for an extra FIVE DOLLARS you can get a cargo van and save gas and wear and tear on your car, but there are the devoted few who still rent the stupid things. If you think that the cars we rent might be slightly mistreated, the trailers are the mother of all abuses. Sometimes there's lights, maybe even a hitch... very very bad. Anyway this year's Golden Helmet goes to an individual who asked us to pull the trailer out of the compound for him and hook it up to his SUV because he didn't want to drive up to it because the back roads were muddy. Congratulations, and good luck with that.

Next we have the 'questionable vitamins' in the car: This was a close one, between a Grand Prix covered in pot and cat hair, to the point where we gutted the little guy and left it in pieces around administration, the mobile meth lab built into the back of one of our Cube vans which was then driven to BC, but the winner of this one has to be the smart feller who left several grand in cash, and enough e and coke to hold a street value of at least five grand, but what really secured the award for him was when he called to get it back.

Now the ever-popular, I'm a crazy cheapskate award. While we have people come in all the time with coupons from the late seventies come in and try to use them, the real winner here was someone who actually called and yelled at us to return the dime he left in his car when he dropped it off. That's right, he wanted his ten cents back, and expected us to deliver it.

Businesses are dumb, and they rent cars. Now we have the stupidest company rental: this one is incomprable. A welding company rented a 15 passenger, which I brought to them, and got the trypical 'that's a pretty big truck for such a little girl'... thanks Jerkface, but the 15 would not be safe, it would later hit a deer, a big one, so we tried to help out and give them another, and about ten minutes before close a week after one member of the company brought back the 15 and told us it no longer worked and that they'd need a new one. The problem was it wouldn't go into park, only neutral with the E-brake. Me, being the car-guru I am stepped outside to check on it and see what was really wrong. It became obvious upon seeing the vehicle covered in about two inches of mud at any point. Popping the hood revealed that it no longer had an air cleaner, or a filter, just mud. Lots of mud. I laughed, then locked the doors.

Special Budget employees: this one shall remain anonymous, but it wasn't me. Two young gents came in and wanted a convertable, despite the sub-zero temperatures. The renter tried to show them how to drop the top, but since it was frozen shut, tore out all the machinery and totalled the car. So he did it to another Beetle, and finally gave the two guys a brand new Dodge Magnum. I shake my head at thee.

I could go on, as you can imagine, there are plenty of stupid people, but I'm tired, and starting to have trouble forming coherent sentences. This should hold you for now. So come to Budget, and you too may be the proud new owner of a GOLDEN HELMET 2006.