You know you officially have too much time on your hands when you find yourself looking up All That sketches on Wikipedia. I know the topic of how good Nickelodeon used to be is sort of worn out, but I am so impressed by how edgy All That was. Would "Vital Information for your everyday life" fly today?

It's fun to play in the snow. It's less fun to play in a bathtub full of vomit.

Have You Ever Thought This?

When I am removing the back of my cell phone to mess with the SIM or memory card, I always keep checking the front of the phone to make sure it's still turned on (i.e., that I haven't jiggled the battery) and it always makes me think about performing a lobotomy.

Last day of classes!

Yo what's really going on???

Bettie Page dies at 85.

There's nothing quite like a guy comparing a black man to a jungle animal to remind us that even in 2008, our racial/sexual norms are pretty fucked up.

My good friend Ned got linked by Gothamist.

Wait...more importantly...Ann Coulter came to my school?

It's finals week and my new iPod is broken, stuck reading the "iPod diagnostics" screen. Forever and ever, no amount of resetting can change it. The Mac equivalent of the blue screen of death, except it's black. Good thing it's still under warranty.

eclectic!

firefox stores the searches you've made in the google search box at the upper right corner of the browser screen. here are some things I have searched for (apparently) that begin with M:
Monika Jagaciak, Murray Hill, m. night shymalan, mac and cheese, macbook troubleshooting, maggie gyllenhaal, mail goggles, male symbol, malta, manhattan college, map of ct, map of europe, maps lyrics, mastectomy, maury, MCAT, medicalization, Mein Kempf, Mercedes Benz, messrs, metro magazine, metro north, michigan, mickey avalon, mideast gulf of, mingala burmese, minimum wage, misanthrope, miscers, modern china, monde, montel williams, montreal hostel, moraga, morton salt girl, mta, mulan, myjambi.com, mystery games for kids

and with C:
Chantilly, candy land, carlton banks, carlyle court, caste system, chinese tainted milk, chloe sevigny, chrome, cisgendered, clitorectomy, collated, colonial era, columbia women's studies, conjunctivitis, connecticut college, courtney love, ct absentee ballot, ct transit, cty canon

it's also worth nothing that when I type in S, I get about a million, no fewer than 10 of which are like, "summer camp dance themes" or "summer camp ideas"

A few words on cancer, or, "Tell me where'd you get that body from?"

Cancer is destructive in every sense of the word, but no amount of radiation therapy can undo the damage it does to a conversation. Nothing makes both speakers more frantically uncomfortable than the C-word.
Case-in-point: today, I was talking to this very old friend, who doesn't really know anything about me. And we were discussing the tastlessness of cancer jokes--which already felt risky, like I might suddenly lose the capacity to filter myself-- when he said that his grandmother had died of cancer.
"Yeah, my mom died of cancer."
What? Why did that come out of my mouth? Why did I turn it up at the end with a strange, sideways little laugh?
"Oh, I'm so sorry," he says, his voice dropping an octave.
Shit. Shit. Now it's out there, floating like something heavy and dead in the air between us. There is nowhere good for the conversation to go after that somehow escapes from your throat. All I can do is try to make it normal as quickly as possible.
"Oh, it's okay. I was really little."
Wait-- so now I'm just lying? Sure, I was really little, if by really little you mean less than a year shy of legal adulthood. My younger sisters and I were all old enough to spell out and google heptocellular carcinoma. In my head I try to rationalize the blatant fib-- "little" isn't really a specific adjective, I was little then, I'm big now-- when I realize the jeans I'm currently wearing were purchased a solid year before my mom died. What a mindfuck.

For a long time, my mother's death felt like the core of my identity. Who knows, maybe I still feel that way. Alexandra Hart is 19 years old. She has blonde hair, blue eyes, she's wearing a blue scarf and her mother died suddenly from brain tumors when she was 17. Defining, identifying, as if anyone who saw me on a subway or in a restaurant would know it about me; it was written all over my skin. I thought, when people looked at me, I must look inexplicably sad, indescribably longing. I'm white and upper-middle class and have nearly every socially constructed privilege of demographic granted to me, but I do not have a mom. And I am sick of pretending that I do in friendly conversation with strangers-- "It's Mother's Day, sweetie, did you remember to call your mom this morning?," "your mom must be real proud of you," "is your momma as pretty as you are?"-- because it is too awkward and too unnecessary to correct their usage of the present tense.
"I was little then, I'm big now." Sure, why the hell not. I carry it around in my belly like bricks all day and sometimes it comes out, backwards and never the way I want it to. What an incredible buzzkill.

Yo! My roommate is a dancer in a music video!

Top 4 Dumbest Fashion Statements Made By College Girls

I don't know the first thing about fashion. I have two outfits: Office Environment, which is something that is not jeans mixed with something that is not a "BAY AREA POETRY SLAM 2006" t-shirt, and All Other Environments, which is a combination of any of the myriad of articles of clothing I own, most of which are acrylic blends and most of which I accumulated during my two years of indentured minimum wage servitude at Forever 21. But in spite of my naivete, I am totally equipped and entitled to judge the fashion decisions of others.

4. Plaid work shirts. Ladies, just because we might have made great strides in achieving employment equality doesn't mean we have to dress in a way that serves as a constant reminder that we too can be lumberjacks and factory workers. It is not, in fact, cute (nor is it ironic) to wear a big plaid shirt with tiny little jeans and some gaudy gold pendant that is probably, if my memory of days of sorting through hundreds of tangled necklaces at Forever 21 is correct, like, owls and elephants and shit. You look utterly ridiculous.

3. Leggings as pants.

I must admit. Yesterday, I walked in the rain and muck to my boyfriend's place wearing purple leggings and a Hanes undershirt. But this was not a #4 Dumbest Fashion Statement, because I was so blatantly scrubbin' it. If it is Sunday and raining and a holiday weekend, and your hair is natty and all you want to do is finish your homework and watch plastic surgery shows on TLC, then it is acceptable to wear leggings. Be that as it may, they are not an attractive look on anyone except the borderline emaciated. Why would you abandon the potential to wear something that has a cool silhouette for something that leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination. Leggings are gross and should be reserved for dancers and grade-schoolers, not 19 year old girls with asymmetrical haircuts and cowboy boots.

2. The Keffiyah.

In addition to looking sloppy and generally unkempt, it's kind of racist and really stupid. Maybe, maybe this is appropriate if you are a well-informed Palestine supporter who does not wear their scarf with the same smug arrogance as so many hipsters, but for the most part these are being worn by people who are at the very most only vaguely aware that the trend originated somewhere in the Middle East before it came to Urban Outfitters.

1. Hideous glasses

Ugh! To read, my mom sometimes had to wear these absurd thick rimmed glasses that she had left over from being a grad student in the 80s and I used to make fun of her for it. Now identical glasses are popping up on the delicate little faces of my peers. This is the female equivalent of men's Kanye West "shade" glasses, only even dumber and more hideous. And don't even give me any of that "they're prescription I need them!" shit-- if you need glasses then get normal glasses or contacts like every other civilized person. Not only is this heinous, but wearing them isn't even cool or ironic anymore. So the only potential benefit your absurd glasses could have reaped is nullified. Get out.

Everyone is in quite a little snit

over Planned Parenthood of Indiana's gift certificate program. I'll admit, when I first heard this was for real, my initial thoughts were, "wow, that's totally fucking weird." But in reading various blog posts/comments about it (like the charming ones on the Washington Times article, above), I decidedthat it's actually not so weird, but that the response to it, sadly, is perpetuating the same tired falsehood anti-choice talking points about planned parenthood...namely:
1) That it is a profit-focused business.
2) That Planned Parenthood primarily performs abortions.
3) That abortions constitute the main source of its profit.

First and foremost, when are people going to understand that Planned Parenthood is a non-profit organization? Say what you will about it "dealing in the business of death" and "taking money hand over fist," but the truth is that PP aims to provide health care to people who need it, and cover its overhead. That's it. PP's corporate figures are not eccentric CEO billionaires. In fact, the full-time employees I've spoken to all say that while the money isn't fantastic, the biggest benefit is the excellent health care plan. Have you ever heard of a profit-oriented company using a sliding scale for payment of services?

On the subject of birth certificates, of course something like this is going to get people whipped into a frenzy of moral righteousness. But I think it makes a lot of sense. It's weird to think about giving someone a gift certificate for an abortion, most definitely, but that's not what this is. Intended as a gift for someone who is uninsured and may have moved health care down on their list of priorities, the certificates are $25-- just about perfect for a month of birth control. I don't think there are a lot of pregnant women who are just $25 short of a $500+ abortion procedure.

All of that said, I can understand the incongruity between Planned Parenthood, an organization which provides contraception and abortion services, and a holiday celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ, the Savior of all the staunchly Christian anti-choice advocates. But I like this idea, in a country where so many people are uninsured, and so many women neglect essential health stuff.