Shopping bug

I'm feeling the shopping bug - I really want to go buy the cartload of things I have from LaSenza, and I finally bought a wide black belt for myself. Only £11. :)

Didn't write yesterday. I'm just exhausted. I was sleeping well today, but alas, Diogo's parents were leaving for Leeds at 5:30am and they woke me up. So I've been up for like three hours. Watching "how to look good naked" and other quality shows.

So, it's been snowing like mad in Colorado, which figures, since I no longer live there. I do like early snows, I just dislike the snow once it continues into March and April and May. I don't know if it will snow here in London this year - it has for the past few years, maybe I'll get lucky. Snow just epitomizes Christmas for me - hell, it also epitomizes Halloween, since we usually get snow for Halloween in Colorado. Hopefully it will snow in St. Louis when I'm there. :)

I'm super excited for Christmas, tonight will be fun at Malcolm et al.'s house for Halloween, and NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow. Ah!

Help!

Hey, I was hoping I could bother you guys for some ideas on characters for my NaNoWriMo novel. I’m doing little vignettes about people, and would like some suggestions or help with people who aren’t often lauded as “interesting” but that you think are interesting, have met people who are unexpectedly interesting…that sort of thing. So, if you have any interesting characters in your life, and wouldn’t mind me borrowing their essence for the novel I will be writing, then please please please comment on this with an explanation of the character, OR you can write it on my formspring.

http://www.formspring.com/forms/?639535-XXsOfKAVeQ

http://www.formspring.com/forms/?639535-XXsOfKAVeQ

http://www.formspring.com/forms/?639535-XXsOfKAVeQ

http://www.formspring.com/forms/?639535-XXsOfKAVeQ

I'll be home for Christmas

Finally finished The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, and I really liked it. It was a very quick read, but even though it was slim, and in translation, it still was an amazing book.

Out of milk this morning, which is unfortunate, so I'm awaiting the return of Diogo's dad so i can eat breakfast. I have Linguistics this afternoon, followed by 19th century German (philosophy). Then we're most likely going....to The Buffalo Bar to go see Joe's band play. I haven't seen Joe in, like, two weeks.

I'm excited for reading week, and I'm now excited to go home for Christmas.

On a side note, because of last night's bowling escapades, my left leg and right shoulder feel as though they've been brutally massacred.

:)

Some academic and interesting things.

Today, I woke up, forced myself to go to class with the Aussie prof lecturing today, came home, went and saw Up (which, I thought, was brilliant, I will be buying that DVD when it comes out), and went Bowling. After bowling, we went to this pub called "The Salt Quay" (Quay=Key for those of you who don't know Britishisms...or shipping/marina terms) and had fish and chips and the outside "beer garden" area was right next to the Thames and you could hear the river slapshing, and when boats went by, water lapped over the edge of the cement. It was very nice.

I'm currently sitting in bed, having just stripped off dirty jeans and socks that I acquired from the bowling alley for £1, thinking about the novel I'm going to write for NaNoWriMo, and plotting our reading week escapes. I think Diogo and I are going to go to Paris or Prague for a day or two, and then have a writing retreat in Wales with a few of our friends.

Oh! Yesterday, after lecture - which I didn't end up going to - Diogo and I went and saw a talk about Human Evolution and Quantum Mechanics. The Evolution lecture was only interesting in the random facts and examples, because being an Anthropology major for a year takes the "Wow, that's amazing" factor out of facts about human evolution. It's still amazing and breathtaking that we exist or work at all, but past that point, it gets a bit repetitive. Quantum mechanics, however, has always interested me in this strange way. Maybe it's because no one can understand it, so there's always something to learn. It was also nice having someone talk and give a coherent lecture on the basics, because just doing the reading can get a bit confusing beyond the Schrodinger's cat experiment - especially when you talk about mathematical probability wave-like things that create atom patterns that shouldn't exist and change whenever you do the most random of things.

For those of you that know a lot about quantum mechanics, you can disregard me, but I like to think about these things and want to share them.

So, when light is shown through a solid screen with two slits in it, the light shows through on a "wall" behind it in pattern of many bars, and interference pattern. The light has to be a single type of light - not like a household lightbulb, but one with only one wavelength. This happens because light travels in waves and when the waves go through the two slits, they compress, for lack of an easier word to explain, and when they emerge on the other side, the waves interfere with each other and create the strange pattern of bars. The explanation is found easily and things make sense to the common sensical, macrocosmic world oriented mind. Now, when atoms go through this same set up of a screen with two slits against a "wall" (which in this case is actually a radiation detector so that when the atoms land they can be accounted for), one would assume they would just go through the two slits like sand and sit in only the spaces behind the slits. The weird thing is that they have the same wave interference patten as the light waves. So, the first thing the scientists though was "Well, maybe it travels in a wave, and they interfere with each other." Well, they sent through atoms one by one, and the same interference pattern occurred, even though there could be no interference.

Weird shit, but it gets better.

When scientists try and capture the data of which slit the atoms go through or try and see how they move through the air, the atoms start behaving like we "think" they would. In the two bars directly behind the slits in the screen. Let's say they tested this with a camera in the box. Once they turn this camera off, even if they leave it IN THE BOX, the atoms go back to their interference pattern. If the camera is ON and IN THE BOX, but they erase the data as soon as it's recorded, the interference pattern returns. So, the weirdness of quantum mechanics is this: how the hell does this happen!? There's no logical and provable reason for this behavior. Which is astonishing in and of itself. Some people think that consciousness is the factor that effects the outcome, some people think that it's just "we're not allowed to see, let it go." And there are many more reasonable explanations that no one can prove. HOWEVER, the math behind the shooting of atoms through the screenshows that the interference pattern will happen. It also shows that the interference pattern won't occur with a camera on, and all of the other scenarios. This brings up the question of what the math is looking at. Also, the philosophical concern of "is the math the basis of reality, not reality the basis of math?"

Pretty weird shit to think about if I don't say so myself. I can't really wrap my head around it, but I will keep reading and re-readingThe Dancing Wu-Li Masters until that information seeps in and I can at least contain it, if not try and find ways to explain it.

That was a nice ramble. :p

Hope all of you are well, and I hope your week goes quickly.

x

Keeping me dry.

So, I'm laying (lying?) in bed, lounging around this morning, downloading lots of things and reading "The Alchemist" by Paulo Coelho.

The list of "things to do this week" includes: watch American Psycho, In bruges, The Darjeeling Limited, Dracula Dead and Loving it, Rocky Horror, the Nightmare Before Christmas, Bright Star, Grave of the Fireflies, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist, Superbad, probably It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown, and random other Halloween themed movies and shows. I also have to finish reading a chapter in my textbook by Friday, which is proving to be harder than it should be, write up an analysis of things, stop hating on all of my female professors (they're the epitome of what I don't want to be as a professor), start sleeping better and stressing out over nothing less. You can tell I'm feeling very academical. :p Literally, half term is coming and going. I have next week for classes, and then reading week. Then only a couple of weeks after that until Christmas break.

Today, Diogo and I were going to go watch Classical music, like I usually do every Monday, but I've been having a slight mental breakdown as of today and yesterday so he's coming home after lectures, and we're going to watch one of the movies, or some more True Blood, whichever we decide on.

An update on books I have read but haven't put down on the list here (which I probably won't be updating anymore, just listing things on here):

The collected works of Plato

Lysistrata by Aristophanes

The English Teacher by R. K. Narayan

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

The Book Thief by Zusak

A Kestrel for a Knave by Hines

The book of Laughter and Forgetting by Kundera

The Prodigy by Hesse

Educating Rita

Shakespeare by Bill Bryson

and I'm currently working through The Alchemist, Catch-22, and the Murakami collection.

I'm really going to try and update more regularly, especially since I will now be working on my NaNoWriMo, so doing things other than writing on my computer can now take a side step. My NaNoNovel is going to be finishable this year. I'm going to write a series of accounts, little vendettas, about people's lives in London and bring them together, like Bright Shiny Morning by the Million Little Pieces guy, or No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July, or like Paris, Je t'aime and New York, I love you.

I've been feeling very rollercoaster lately, for no real reason, but y'know, such is life. I'm doing things that make me happy, but when I get stationary, I get wild - something like anger or sadness overtakes me, and sometimes I don't know how to handle it, so I just lay in bed and cry it out. I wish I knew the cause, but maybe it's just all of the changes in my life, and the fact that I can't sleep due to nightmares or the fact that people are up at all hours in and around this flat making noise. I'm hopeful for November that I'll become more stable as I will finally be living with fewer people until the holidays, and then after January until June or July. I think I just need more quiet in my life - I did go from living with a quiet family, to living alone, to living with just my cat, to living with three relatively noisy people. But, this is just my frustration with never having any quiet at all around here.

I need to buy my plane ticket home to the states today, and I need to stop worrying about money. Everything will work out. I'm going to apply for a job as a cat sitter on a 20 hour per week basis, and the pay is £10 a visit, which isn't bad at all, that's the equivalent of making £20 an hour, but I won't have the regularity for that. Before I call, though, I need to write up my CV, though I think they don't really require one. I'll just mainly focus on my references. Which are good. I have one reference of my good standing here in London with Diogo/his family, Malcolm has had me take care of his pets in the states before, along with his siblings, and I'll give e-mails of my neighbors for whom I pet sat, and the address of the cat shelter I volunteered at. I should be in the clear and get the job. I do like cats more than people.

I've become slightly obsessed with Tumblr this week, so if y'all are on Tumblr, add me: errabundus.tumblr.com

Other than that, I don't have much to report. I'm going to see a guy lecture on quantum physics with Diogo this evening after my lecture. We should be going to Joe's gig on Thursday night. Saturday is Halloween, and I think we'll be going over to Malcolm/rashed/Joe/Naomi's house to celebrate - probably with Kurosawa films and gore flicks. :)

Hope you're all well. <3

An Update on my 101 in 1001

1. Read all unread books on my bookshelves.
2. Learn how to order an alcoholic beverage that I like.
3. Graduate college with honors. [Or at least a 3.8 GPA].
4. Make Dean’s List at my college at least once.
5. Write in a journal every day. [0/1001]
6. Visit mainland Europe.
7. Visit Asia.
8. Go to Cairo.
9. Learn to play another instrument.
10. Attend the 2010 World Cup in Johannesburg, South Africa.
11. Grow camellias.
12. Read Dante’s Divine Comedy, in English, and Italian.
13. Become fluent in French [and hold a conversation with a native speaker.]
14. Become fluent in Arabic [and hold a conversation with a native speaker.]
15. Post at least 20 videos this year on 1001books. [0/20]
16. Go to a concert in another country.
17. Learn how to make sushi.
18. Make a new friend.
19. Submit something to be published somewhere.
20. Go on a road trip.
21. Learn a Greek dance in Athens.
22. Get a tattoo.
23. Edit an article on Wikipedia.
24. Learn how to mix drinks.
25. Get a part-time job I enjoy.
26. Watch a football match in a foreign country, aside from the World Cup.
27. Watch all 101 films on http://www.films101.com/filmsr.htm [24/101]
28. Learn a whole song on guitar.
29. Visit Walden Pond.
30. Participate in the Beckoning of Lovely.
31. Host a dinner party.
32. Visit the ocean.
33. Go to Montauk, NY.
34. Learn how to be happy with my weight.
35. Take at least 3 classes just for fun [3/3]
36. Run a race.
37. Take yoga for a month.
38. Meet the Dalai Lama
39. Read every religious text, and reserve judgement.
40. Move out.
41. Move on.
42. Ride a train across some section of Europe.
43. Read Anna Karenina all the way through this time.
44. Wear something crazy.
45. Get a different haircut.
46. Find a little black dress.
47. Attend a party, and be the life of it.
48. Learn how to sail a boat.
49. Buy someone flowers for no reason.
50. Play in the leaves during autumn.
51. Be an extra in a film.
52. Learn how to keep plants alive.
53. Recommend books for 5 friends that match them. [5/5]
54. Write family letters.
55. Buy a typewriter.
56. Stay a night in a trashy motel.
57. Learn to be unafraid of hostels, then stay in one.
58. Volunteer somewhere that needs me.
59. Volunteer somewhere I may one day need.
60. Take a picture that I will be proud of.
61. Learn how to ballroom dance!
62. Learn how to figure skate!
63. Save up money to use at the end of this challenge!
64. Do something randomly kind for 30 days. [0/30]
65. Visit 25 museums [10/25]
66. Go to Chicago and take a picture with the Bean!
67. Go to a fancy/well-known art gallery.
68. Carve a jack-o-lantern.
69. Skydive. Once.
70. Mail in a secret to PostSecret.
71. Visit 5 “gardens.” [4/5]
72. Visit 5 zoos. [1/5]
73. Go to Dodge, then get the hell out of it.
74. Make a list of things that make me happy.
75. Eat entirely organic for one month.
76. Foster an animal.
77. Go swimming every day for two weeks.
78. Visit the English seaside.
79. Catch a butterfly.
80. Succeed in NaBloPoMo. [27/30]
81. Win at NaNoWriMo.
82. Keep track of all of the books read for one year.
83. Go sing karaoke somewhere.
84. Accept all social invites for one week.
85. Take the MENSA test.
86. Be on time for work once, or twice.
87. Learn a way to keep myself from biting my nails.
88. Play 18 holes of golf. [0/18]
89. Handmake decorations for a holiday, or a room.
90. Go on an archaeological dig.
91. Ride a train across the US.
92. Donate blood.
93. Write a letter to a company with a comment, question or concern.
94. Write my resume.
95. Use only cash for a week.
96. Read 10 non-fiction books [that are unassigned]. [10/10]
97. Avoid jury duty.
98. Invent a crafty way to get rid of creeps.
99. Have more fun with my friends and family.
100. Feel better about my appearance.
101. Make another list once this one is complete.