The Incredible Adventures of a Flibbertigibbet

Why I am sitting around in my filthy pjs at 4am watching Rachel Maddow make Stingers, champagne cocktails, obituary cocktails and talk about how awful mint juleps can be. 

Yep. Its going to be an interesting summer.

AsdffgjklSjdjfjgj

That is all.

When is that fine line crossed, between genuine curiosity and outright stalking? And if someone posts online in open, public forums, does that give others the right (or does it make it ok) to comb through those forums?

Poured too much Creme due Menthe. This is going to take a while to drink.

Ever had Creme the Menthe? It is much like drinking Listerine, except it’s supposed to get you drunk.

Just trying out this app. Looks like it works OK.

1. Sybarite - a person devoted to pleasure and luxury

2. Concupiscence- strong desire; especially : sexual desire - Merriam-Webster

• Bread fresh out of the oven
• Cheese
• Dark, dark chocolate

I thought I was done with virtual school. You thought so too, no? After all the awful things that happened last time around. But alas, virtual school is upon me again, and more than a year since the last time, it has gotten no better. This time, I take the second part of United States History and Speech. Ugh.

I am on page one of USHB and already, there are facedesk moments. In the very first page, the author has already managed to imply that the Bible is truth only because it got passed down from one person to another (one can only assume this author was deprived of a childhood and never played a game of telephone). Also, saying that they don’t mean to imply that history is like a sport, but let us tell you how history is like a sport. 

Today I was caught in the middle of a 10 minute rainstorm, one of those weird Houston weather events where it will rain like there is no tomorrow for about 10 minutes and then the sun will come out and everyone will go on with their day. I was walking from one building to another right when it started raining, and I had my ear buds on, iPod on shuffle. Suddenly, Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, 4th movement comes on, the one about the storm. Seconds after the 1st roar of thunder outside, the music got to the part where Beethoven uses timpani to imitate the sound of thunder. It was just an awesome coincidence, but I stayed out a little while longer watching the rain until the 5th movement ended. 

It is one of those nights when you look something up on Wikipedia, and then you click on one of those blue words to learn more about it, and then on another little blue word, and soon you’ve forgotten the first thing you looked up, but you’ve learned a lot in the process. Tonight I was learning about drinks, and specifically cocktails, when I found this bit of info:

It’s worth mentioning that the site of the first cocktail party still stands. In 1924 the Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis bought the Walsh mansion at 4510 Lindell Blvd., and it has served as the local archbishop’s residence ever since. Perhaps the archdiocese will be inspired to erect a plaque of some sort commemorating this essential event in American history. And why not? After all, many of the Walshes’ guests that Sunday noon had spent their morning in church.

The information was on the Wikipedia article itself, but this is a quote from the source, an article about the very fist cocktail party. Isn’t that something? My feelings for the Catholic church are not the happiest, even in the best of times, but one thing they are good for is bringing out giggles and condescending laughter from me in the wee hours of the morning,   

Dear People Doing Fireworks at 3am on July the 6th,

I live in the state of Texas, where one can legally carry a gun as long as no one can see it. Aside from the godawful logic lack of logic in this law*, it is especially problematic to live in a state where fireworks are quite popular. Now, I am not against fireworks in general, or fireworks on Fourth of July at a park or field space, away from potentially flammable buildings. I get it, fireworks look cool and are fun to set off. I watched a really awesome fireworks display near a pier at the beach yesterday and I had a blast.  

What I am against is fireworks, in a neighborhood, at 3am, on July 6th. What is wrong with you, fireworks at 3am people? Don’t you know that Independence day is on the fourth, and fireworks have no business going off on the 6th, because there are no holidays celebrated on this day? Don’t you know that fireworks sound a lot like shots to the untrained ear? Don’t you know that homes are flammable, and that people live in these homes? Also, don’t you know that there are young people running to hide under beds because they are afraid of floating witches outside their windows and you are aggravating their misled and completely ridiculous fear?

Think of the young people, fireworks people. They are irrational as you are, and need for you not to encourage their irrationality.

Please, refrain from doing fireworks at this time, fireworks people. It is for the peace of mind of the whole neighborhood, especially those scared young’ins. 

Sincerely,

A concerned citizen who may or may not be hiding under the bed right now, waiting for the floating witch to please go be a creeper at someone else’s window.   

* WHY WOULD YOU LET PEOPLE CARRY GUNS AS LONG AS NO ONE CAN SEE THEM? THAT IS STUPID, HOW ARE YOU GOING TO KNOW WHO IS CARRYING A GUN UNTIL THERE IS A SHOOTOUT? AND DON’T SAY A LICENSE OR PERMIT BECAUSE I KNOW PEOPLE DON’T ASK TO SEE LICENCES AND PERMITS AT GUN SHOWS.</rant>

I have managed to scare myself into believeing that there is some sort of witch or scary looking being right outside my window. I don’t quite know how this happened. Ok, I kind of do. I was looking though this list of hoaxes on Wikipedia, and one of them mentioned a family who said they saw ghosts in a house where a family had been killed. I know this is a hoax, because it was on the list of hoaxes, but while reading this, I had the mental image of a scary being, in black robes and witch-like and floating, outside my window. A part of my brain says ‘You are stupid, there are obviously no floating-

juuses JEESUS CHRIST WAS THAT A FIREWORK? WHY ARE PEOPLE DOING FIREWORKS IT IS THE FUCKING FIFTH OF JULY and I am kind of really super scared right now, for christsakes stop it!-

evil witch being outside your window right now” but the other part says “Omg omg omg there is a floating witch outside my window omg, and if I open the blinds to look I will be scared ‘cause omg i have never seen a scary witch thing’

I must say that before this day I thought myself a rational person. I don’t believe I am intoxicated, at the moment, and really this has never happened to me before, but I am the biggest scaredy cat ever.

Someone talk me out of this. Please?

Its the dog days of summer, when nothing is happening, and you feel like lazying around all day. Maybe your girlfriend is vacationing in Canada and can’t phone you. Maybe you are just feeling sad. Feel sad no more! Just look at these baby elephants.                              

Don’t they renew you faith in humanity and your hope that your troubles will soon be forgotten? Yes they do, don’t lie to yourself. 

What is this sun? Why are birds chirping? I have not been to bed. I have been booing and cursing and threatening my computers like small children because they won’t behave and do what I ask them to do. The sun can’t be out yet, because I have not slept. This is silly, sun, get back to bed. Get back here, moon! Hey, moon! Don’t leave me…

Yo no puedo tenerte ni dejarte, 
ni sé por qué, al dejarte o al tenerte, 
se encuentra un no sé qué para quererte 
y muchos sí sé qué para olvidarte.

Pues ni quieres dejarme ni enmendarte, 
yo templaré mi corazón de suerte 
que la mitad se incline a aborrecerte 
aunque la otra mitad se incline a amarte.

Si ello es fuerza querernos, haya modo, 
que es morir el estar siempre riñendo: 
no se hable más en celo y en sospecha,

y quien da la mitad, no quiera el todo; 
y cuando me la estás allá haciendo, 
sabe que estoy haciendo la deshecha.

Sor Juana Inéz de la Cruz. 

There is a special genre of Mexican music I like to call Break out the Tequila, My Woman Has Left Me Music. It is music you drunkenly sing in tears after you have half a bottle of Tequila at some bar, because your woman just left you and it hurts, dammit. It doesn’t require much instrumentation, a guitar will do. It doesn’t require much vocal prowess, and it even sounds good half yelled, half unintelligible because you’ve drank too much. In short, it’s the best breakup music. 

My favorite singer so far is Chabela Vargas. Her voice is always halfway a cry, which is perfect for these songs, and makes them sound very heartfelt and especially sad. 

@simplydaretodiffer said: Did you see the commenter who used every single one of the slang words into one big paragraph?

Yes I did and it was awesome. :D 

To celebrate Pride month, AS has been doing some posts on lesbian history, all of which have been very interesting. My favorite so far, because I am a logophile, has been this post on slang from Alyson Almanac’s ”DICTIONARY OF SLANG AND HISTORICAL TERMS” 

Although all terms are awesome, a quick list of my favorites:

 MAKE SCISSORS OF SOMEONE: To masturbate a woman by simultaneously rubbing her clitoris with the thumb and her anus with the forefinger.

 DESPERATION NUMBER: A sex partner found just before closing time at the bar.

FUNCH: A quick sexual encounter performed at lunchtime.

MISSIONARY WORK: An attempt by a gay man or lesbian to seduce a straight person of the same sex.

DISHONORABLE DISCHARGE: To masturbate at home after unsuccessfully going out in search of a sex partner.

Is time like those awful angel statues from Dr.Who? 

 The Angels are “quantum locked”, allowing them to move incredibly fast when unobserved but when they are seen, they literally turn to stone. They cover their eyes to avoid looking at each other, giving them their “weeping” appearance.   -Wikipedia

The quantum Zeno effect is a name coined by George Sudarshan and Baidyanath Misra of the University of Texas in 1977 in their analysis of the situation in which anunstable particle, if observed continuously, will never decay.  -Wikipedia

Is time quantum locked? When we watch it it never goes by, but we take our eyes off it for a second and suddenly it has wasted away?

I seriously thought it was 8pm until I glanced at the clock and saw that it is 12:33. How the fuck did this happen?  

Time flies even when you are not having fun. 

Oh politics, you take my breath away. Election times are the best. Candidates pitted against each other, trying to persuade uninterested citizens to give them a job, good times. A cynic would argue that all elections are shit, and maybe they would be right, but elections are still very interesting to watch. Take the Mexican presidential election: four candidates, one representing 70 years of corrupt rule, one representing 12 years of failed policies, a grandpa, and a random hipster. Who will win?

On closer inspection, we see that whoever wins, it seems like Mexico is set to loose.

Take the front runner Enrique Peña Nieto, the PRI candidate(pictures above,first from left). PRI had been in power in Mexico for 70 years, until the election of Vicente Fox in 2000. Some fun facts about EPN:

• According to the Guardian newspaper in England, EPN has been paying the biggest news organization in Mexico, Televisa, to report favorably and repeatedly about his term as governor of State of Mexico. 
• EPN is endorsed by Rebecca Black. Yes, that Rebecca Black from the Friday video, who doesn’t even speak Spanish. 

Then in a race for second place, Josefina Vasquez Mota (second from left) and Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (fourth from left).

Josefina represents the PAN party, that has been in power for the last 12 years. PAN has been in power during the infamous war on drugs, and wants to keep it that way. Josefina’s major campaign argument is that she is a woman. She also got into quite a bit of trouble because of her stance on gay rights.

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is the populist leader from the PRD party, that seems like it will never get elected into power. He has run for president many times now, and last time he came close, but became very miffed and demanded a recount.  This is the guy who repeatedly petitioned to get more time in debates, because he speaks so slowly. Almost everyone agrees that he is too old for the post.

These two are more than 16 points behind in the polls, with less than a week to go until the July 1st elections.

And last but not least there is the hipster, Gabriel Quadri. Quadri is from the PANAL party, and he is greatly critizised for being a mama’s boy, mama being Elba Esther Gordillo,  the corrupt leader of PANAL and the teaching syndicate . Quadri knows he is not going to win, with poll numbers in the single digits, so he mostly goes to the debates to suggest random things. 

Of course there are all kinds of allegations that the vote is going to be bought, that the media is giving away the election to Peña Nieto, that there has been misuse of campaign funds, that the urns will be filled in independently, that the drug cartels will chose the president.

Organizations have arisen for all sides, some more controversial than others. The I am student 132 movement argues that the media unfairly favors EPN, and uses the same kinds of protest tactics as the American Occupy movement. The Indignant Children are a group that pushed random children into the battle to guilt the candidates.

Elections are less than a week away, and things are heating up. I really can’t wait to see how this ends.  

I went to the Pride parade and festival! It was very fun, walked around and saw all kinds of awesome things. Parade at night was super fun too, interesting floats, sponsors and people. I had an awesome time! :D 

Where is the fish? Where is the fish? Where, where, where, where is the fish? 

The fish is in the bowl. The bowl is on the mat. The mat is on the fireplace, the fireplace in the kitchen. The kitchen, in the house. Everything is in its place. 

@simplydaretodiffer said: You have your imagination though! Use it! Relax. Read books. Think about the world! Watch TV!

Economics is way interesting though. And I am watching teevee. There are two episodes of Law and Order every day at 11, I think, right on time for breakfast. I am also reading Dr.Zhivago, but it is at an infuriating point where he is just a random partisan doctor for the Reds. 

@simplydaretodiffer said : Maria, may I ask what in the hell are you doing? I thought you were gonna kill this summer!

This summer is killing me! If I was going crazy before with my 30 extra hours of time with myself, I am going bonkers now after only 3 days of me with myself and I at home.  At any rate, it is some sort of prep work, I do have to take the AP microeconomics test in May, I may as well do this.  

I have been moaning and groaning for a whole year that pre-calculus is the work of the devil, mostly because I thought my teacher was a child of the devil. She turned out to be a decent teacher with a particularly disagreeable character, but pre-cal as a subject became no better for me. That whole graphing of rational functions always seemed like black magic to me. 

And now, here I am, two days into summer break. I am bored out of my mind, so I decided to take an MIT Open Courseware class on Economics. Fair enough, right? Everyone loves economics, because it is kind of, sort of related to math in a tangential way. It gives you the feeling of doing something math-y without having to actually do real math, right? Wrong. This particular basic course on microeconomics requires knowledge of single variable calculus. I have to learn single variable calculus.

I am going to attempt to learn single variable calculus, so that I may understand the MIT Microeconomics course, which sounds lovely, calculus notwithstanding.  Luckily, MIT also has its own Open Courseware class on single variable calculus and it looks fairly comprehensible. Here I go.

This is one of those times. 

Recently, I have found out that I am a bit of a masochist. I mean, you’d think I’d learn not to heap so much on my academic plate, but I just don’t learn. I even enjoy the rush of doing last minute work because I procrastinated. Like this week, when I went to bed at 4am because I was finishing a Polio paper that I had 4 weeks to work on, but instead did in 6 hours. Doing calculations and projections and such, I predict most of summer will be spent getting ready for various academic competitions and tests. And I may take online summer classes, again. Because I apparently didn’t learn anything from last time. There goes my summer. 

Sometimes things are difficult to understand, like how the whole ban on burkas works in France. Also? Physics. 

Today’s little mystery, however, is why, oh why have the 50 Shades books become so popular? 

This is something hard to understand for me because a) I find erotica and porn to be so readily accessible and b) I don’t see much literary merit in Twilight or it’s fan fiction. Perhaps it is that as a teenager without kids to take care of and lots of theoretical time on my hands, it has not been hard for me to find erotica, and quality erotica at that. I mean, all it takes is a quick Google search to find a Wikipedia article, books of erotica, a ‘gorgeous collection of black ink erotica from Las Vegas’ and more. So why don’t more women read erotica, or why is this particular piece of erotica so popular? Is it the popularity effect? Do women read Shades of Grey because it is popular and you can talk to your friends about it? Is it because it is suddenly socially acceptable to read erotica and Shades of Grey is an easy place to start? Why don’t more people read the Delta of Venus by Anais Nin? Or why isn’t the internet buzzing about the sex blogs and all the quality erotica that goes on in them? I just don’t understand the appeal of this particular book. From what I’ve heard and read, it is not a literary masterpiece. Are America’s women really so deprived in the field of erotic literature and BDSM? One of the most confounding things about these books has been some of the conversation around them, like how the Dr. Oz show brought in everything but a sex educator. And how everyone kept implying that if you were going to play with bondage, male should be dominant and woman should be the one being tied. Ugh. At one point someone stated that the relationship between Grey and Anastasia should only be fantasied about, never carried out, without understanding that there are rules and procedures in bondage and in BDSM. Without understanding that one can have a perfectly fulfilling and exciting relationship while in a Dom/Sub dynamic. Could someone please explain? Please. 

*Adventures in Irresponsibility for short. 

Things I am doing: 

• Stalking on Facebook
• Going through at least a week’s worth of posts I have missed on my dashboard
• Avoiding a paper on Polio
• Writing on here
• Going through pictures from 5+ years ago

Things I should be doing: 

• Seeing about not failing one last hideous math test
• The Polio paper
• Straightening out my “Pigsty”
• Other productive things that don’t quite come to mind. 

Will I actually get anything accomplished tonight? 

Stay tuned for the most god-awfully boring adventures in the Incredible Adventures so far. 

This was one of those nights