Nonloxodromical Groaner

I was forced to make a video about myself for one of my classes.  Initially, the overwhelming possibilities of exactly HOW I wanted to portray myself left me thumbing through absolutely every photo of myself I could get a hold of.  Then, I remembered my Professor's words; she said that no one used awkward, ugly, embarrassing, or religious* photos.  I decided to use all of the above for my project.  Let's be honest, I am all of the above.  In the end, I opted to 'tell a story' since I don't exactly have a lot of my older photos in digital format.


*Disclaimer- the religious photos are of my wedding, which was non-religious... which is what I wanted.  This was because my husband and I have differing opinions on the almighty- he believes there isn't one, and I believe there are dozens of them.  I still believe that we had a religious ceremony, however, since I could feel an enormous sense of being watched.  That might have been because of the paying audience, though.

The End

It was final's week last just a few weeks ago and depending on where you were you might never have guessed it. I had just left my Poli Sci final when I almost bumped into someone in the bathroom. Considering it was finals week, I looked about as attractive as this: 

Except my hair was pulled back in ponytail and unwashed because who has
time for beauty when there are finals to pass?

The answer is this girl I almost bumped into. She must not have needed to study because she looked like this:

Granted, she wasn't actually Taylor Swift, but she was blonde, had perfectly
curled hair and more make up than I've ever worn.

That being said, the semester is over! Essays have been written, tests have been taken and classes have been passed. Time for summer! But before we break out the bathing suits and tan in the Humboldt sun (Hahaha, yeah right!), Bry and I would like to share some memorable quotes from our teachers. A week into this semester, I realized my English teacher was hilarious because he always had my whole class laughing. I started writing down as many funny things he said so I could share them. I managed to find a few moments to record in my French class as well. Here's what I spent the semester laughing to:


My English teacher's memorable quotes (a middle-aged man):


~ "How do you separate the heart from the rest of the body?"
   "With a scalpel" (A student's quiet response.)


~ "You're talking to the king of lazy people."


~ "Well, if you want to be an asshole, go ahead."


~ "OMG, this thing, unlike my bicycle manual, has meaning!" (In reference to what makes literature literature.)


~ "Well, you're obviously an oddball. Just like me!"


~ "Any good acid-takers will tell you..."


~ "She's a witch. She's a tool of Satan."


~ "That sticks in my craw. I sound, like, 90!"


~ "Alright, well, I surfed the internet for porn for six hours, not seven."


~ "There's the perfect analogy. You snort the line of coke but then you don't rub your teeth afterwards. And then you turn to everybody and say, "You're a bunch of coke-heads ad I want nothing to do with you!"


~ "...or if she had anything wrong with her, she was a filthy whore."


~ "Rush Limbaugh went into rehab for hillbilly heroin."


~ "But you're got these monkeys on your back and they're called gay sex..."


~ "Now that I've lost a family member we're stopping this? Hell no, we're truckin' on!" (An explanation of the short story The Lottery.)


~ "If you look at the Top 10 albums right now, I guarantee they're shitty albums. My opinion."


~ "I'm a jerk off. Just because I've been saying something for 20 years doesn't make it right."


~ "'OMG, Kevin Costner wants to come and talk to us about how to clean up the oil spill. He must have something to say.' Coincidentally, he did." (These last two were in explanation of the logical fallacy False Authority.)


~ "You're sitting at home with your buddy watching the 700 club, like I know you all do..."


~ "So, if Julie is a cross dresser, this changes the premise."
   "Got tricked by a tranny." (A student's response.)


~ "It's possible that you smoked too much crack."


~ "This is going to be my one opportunity to feel like a man today and I'm not going to because I know nothing about [basketball]."


~ "And I'm a dipshit when it comes to real world, practical skills."


~ "I fuck up everything."


~ "He says he's lost some part of himself. Well, where the hell does he expect to find it? Behind a bush?"


~ "You guys sort of jiggy with this?"


~ "OMG, we are bitchin'!"


~ "Put a gun to their head, kidnap their children, bribe them..." (In reference to help us figure out how to convince our readers in our last essay of the semester)

This is apparently how you get an A in my English class.
Needless to say, I got a B.

Memorable quotes from my French teacher (a sixty year old woman):


~ "But if I say be French... No, I can't say that." (Trying to give an example on commanding people to be something.)

This is what you get when you google search "be French".

~ "Now, if we're all interrogating this spy here..." (Trying to give an example of the plural form of a verb.)


~ "Why don't I tell you a few things to be *pfft* because I'm perfect. Why don't you tell me what to be." (Still searching for an example for how to explain commanding people.)


~ "So, the Germans are gonna drag you off and shoot you!" (Said after a student made a grammar mistake.)


~ "You didn't know it was masculine so I won't have the German's shoot you. I shouldn't say that, should I? I should say the Nazi's."


~ "When I was in France, I didn't have any cat. That's not better. Let's just move on."

This should solve my teacher's lack of cats problem.

~ "I just got nervous. I don't want the Germans to shoot me." (Said by a student reluctant to give an answer to a question.)


I, on the other hand, spent most of my semester planning two weddings... then cancelling both... then deciding to have the craziest most unbelievable wedding ever.  In between that, I spent my days in class writing down some silly quotes from teachers as well.


I spent my Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings at 9:00 AM listening to my Professor -who reminded me constantly of Tina Fey- ramble on about Art History for 50 fabulous minutes.  I say 'fabulous' because she frequently said naughty things that everyone was thinking but you never expected someone to voice.  She often oggled the nudes, but let's take a look at what she had to say:

~ "If he really liked the Queen, she would be killed and buried too- romantic." (Discussing Egyptian burials.)


~ "Athena knows if you do a half-ass job." (Describing why the Romans would sculpt such incredible details on the back of statues when only the fronts would show.)

~ "The Sleeping Satyr is erotic because he is drunk and passed out, and doesn't know you are looking at his crotch." (Self-explanatory.  The whole class was looking...)

You're welcome.

~ "Sort of like a webcam to God.  'That is absolutely delicious and I am going to steal it if you don't mind'..." (Imagining what the angel in the middle of "Three Angels Visiting Abraham" was thinking.)


~ "All lends to making the outside ugly so the inside can be breathtaking." (Explaining Buttresses and Flying Buttresses.)


~ "Yeah, here I am, naked.  Shall we have sex?" (Imagining what the Harem Girl must be thinking.)


~ "I have to come up with a way to say that that doesn't make me laugh - but I guess castration isn't funny at all..." (O.o)

My Monday and Wednesday afternoons from 4:00 to 5:20 PM, I could be found lounging about learning about the International Political Economy.  Our lovely professor brightened the subject with an occasional quip.

~ "Norms are fuzzy things." (I have no explanation.)

He is pretty fuzzy...

~ "I'm not building up my military to attack, it's just for defense." "Yeah, right..." (Playing both roles, and talking to herself.)


~ "Make theories talk to each other." (Attempting to clarify telling us how to study for the final.  No help at all.)


Bright and early at 8:00 AM on Tuesdays and Thursdays I got to listen to my INSANE religious studies professor ramble on about what was ruining our country, and what kind of a man Jesus REALLY was.  While reading these, bear in mind that this man considers Jesus his personal savior.

~ "Things cease to be relevant as we move forward in time- let it go.  They are following hollow ritual when the ship has clearly sunk and would rather go back to  where they came from than move forward because the future is scary." (Explaining Catholicism.)


~ "Compromise is necessary because purity is hard to maintain." (Talking about Eastern piety.)


~ "Somalia is the epitome of the absence of systems." (Learning about order.)


~ "What would Jesus do? Fly a fighter jet off a carrier and bomb the shit out of the bastards!!" (Topic was 9/11)


~ "Baseball is the best sport ever.  Cricket is OK.  Soccer?  What IS that?!  You hit the ball with your head." (Taking positions on religions that are similar to your own.)


~ "We could do away with so many of the world's problems if we all just had good manners." (Hates rude people.)


~ "I'm telling you you're a cocksucker and a motherfucker!" (Yelling at the class, to show what rage is.)


~ "I doubt Buddha was a Buddha." (No faith in anyone but Jesus.)

Which one is the real Buddha???

~ "Wow, you people need better math!"
   "You didn't say it was binary, we weren't thinking that deep."
   "You need to." (Telling us how we learn by association...)


~ "God taps Moses on the shoulder. 'Hey Moses.  Here, write this down.  In the beginning - NO, THE beginning, THE beginning'..." (The Bible was written by man, not literally passed down from God.)


~ "Some guy came down from the mountain and told me this so now I gotta do it - yeah let's all drink the kool-aid." (Interpretation of the Ten Commandments.)


~ "You ain't gonna tie no fucking bull to a plow unless you wanna die.  You ever been chased by a bull?  No?  Well let me tell you..." (*no explanation*)


~ "You can't be a little bit pregnant.  You either are or you aren't.  That is the definition of mutually exclusive."


~ "I'm open, show me.  I don't fucking believe this, but show me." (His definition of Agnostics.)


~ "He wasn't that lazy... I mean, he wrote all this shit." (About Chuangzi and his laid back philosophy.)


~ "Who else was alive in 500 BCE?"
   "Everybody else that was cool in the religious world!"
   "Yeah fucking right.  What about Jesus?"
   "Oh."


~ "If Bill Clinton could save all the people on Earth from suffering, would he?  Hell yes he would!  He would be the greatest fucking person on Earth!  He would be as great a Jesus.  How ambitious- he'd be greater than Jesus!" (In reference to IF ambition was a desire to be lost to save the soul.)

Directly after being cursed at by my 8:00 AM professor, I got and hour and twenty minutes of Government from 10:30 to 11:50.  Only partially through the course did I realize that I she was Canadian.

~ "Maybe if we ignore it, it will go away." (Slavery.)


~ "Now, I'm picking on Fox because they deserve it.  Fox is a fungus on the tree of Democracy."


~ "OK, we'll start off with pornography for the next class..." (Excellent way to assure attendance.)


~ "No race has a monopoly on being a a jerk." (On racism.)

Well, it is racist...

Nostalgia Part One: Spring

Spring, here in Arcata, looks rather similar to just about every other season around here.

Does this look familiar?

But, every few weeks, a day will come along and look like this:

Alright, maybe it never looks QUITE like this.

And when that once a month sunny day comes along, since it's so out of place, instead of seeming normal it takes us whirling back to our childhood. The second house we lived in, in Hidden Valley, is where we lived the longest in one place with my parents and therefore where most of my memories of spring are from. Here are some things we remember.








Our springtime memories may vary from yours.

So much green!

The first sign of spring was always the tall grass that grew in our backyard. It always seemed to just pop up overnight. Dad would always wait until after Easter to weed wack so that we would have tall grass for our annual Easter Egg Hunt. The grass was followed by...

Tiny mushrooms!

They grew everywhere and seemed to make our yard more magical.  Personally, I remember looking at everything in the spring from about an inch away. 

A lot of my childhood memories look like this.

I remember Bry and I frequently wandering our yard with a magnifying glass just so we could see things in more detail.

Should have just invested in a pair of these.

After mushrooms came clouds. Or, rather, breaks in the clouds. Magically, one day the sky goes from looking like this:

Granted, I've never personally seen it look like this...

To looking like this:

Bry thinks this looks like a crab.

You could always tell that spring had arrived when there were more and more patches of blue in the sky. Along with blue skies, harmless white clouds and grass comes:

Wildflowers!

(When I was six, someone told me it was illegal to pick poppies... That's not true, right?)
What grew in our backyard were mostly:

Red clovers!

And a TON of:

Miner's lettuce.

Not only is miner's lettuce edible (and delicious) but it added hours to our playing time outside before we had to go inside. If anyone was ever curious why Bry and I were so thin and healthy during our childhood, here is one reason. Instead of running inside for soda, cookies or other unhealthy snacks, whenever we were hungry, when we were in our yard playing, we just bent down and grabbed some of this stuff.


Once flowers started growing it was always time for:

Allergy season!

Bry and I seemed to be (and for the most part continue to be) allergic to everything in the spring. In our back yard we had two of these:

The damn trees in our yard made up for not producing fruit by
dropping enough pollen to build a person on our yard.

The trees would make it up to us by doing this once a year:

In case you were curious, yes, that yellow carpet of leaves is ridiculously fun to play in.

When Bry and I were in kindergarten and elementary school, our parents made our teachers keep us inside during the spring so that we couldn't play outside and aggravate our allergies. That's right, we were those kids. The ones they make fun of on tv. One day in kindergarten, while we were sitting inside like this:

We would have had more fun in a bubble.

The whole cafeteria broke out into a food fight and Bry and I were the only kids who didn't get in trouble. We'd just been sitting in our classroom eating green grapes. 

And now, we arrive at the last important part of spring:

We actually had a rabbit that looked like the one on the left.

Easter! Even though my parents raised us pagan they still had us celebrate (to a degree) Christmas and Easter. For us, Easter simply meant two things:

Our baskets were so much better than this.

First thing Easter morning, the three of us kids would wake up and start searching the house. Unlike Christmas, Easter was allowed to start before our parents woke up. Why? Because the night before, after we'd gone to bed, our parents would have spent up to an hour finding just the right hiding places for our Easter baskets. Since Alia was younger than us by five years, hers was always the first we'd find. It would be some place easy like in a cupboard behind some pots and pans. For Bry and I, though, sometimes we actually had to give up and wait until our parents took pity on us and told us where they'd hidden our baskets. Different years we gave up only to be told to look in the oven or in the car. (They were desperate for new spots by the time they used the car.)

Our baskets were hidden like the message in this Magic Eye.
Can you find it?

Now, our Easter baskets weren't like other kids' Easter baskets. Our baskets didn't just come with candy. Our baskets were the stockings of Spring. Like our Christmas stockings, our Easter baskets always came with a new toothbrush. Always. To this day, for Christmas and Easter our mom still gives us toothbrushes twice a year.  

That brings us to the last part of spring!

What's up with the boy holding a pillowcase and the girl with a paper bag?

Easter egg huts! When we were little, our parents used to just hide eggs in super obvious places around the house. This probably continued until Alia was two at which point our parents started hosting Easter egg hunts for our friends, too. It was always amazing fun. Dad would leave all the grass uncut until after the party so that it was extra hard to find the eggs. Our mom would spend about a month filling little plastic eggs with toys and miniature candy. At the end of the day, mom would make sure to count all the eggs we'd found in order to make sure we'd found all the eggs they'd put out. We never did. We would always end up finding a few throughout the rest of the year. My parents were pretty good at hiding those damn eggs.

Unlike Facebook.






























You're a dork if you understood that.

Day 30 - A picture of a person you miss.

We very much miss our Caitling.

When she moved away she left an odd shaped hole in our lives that we will never be able to fill.

I think we can all agree that it's time for some more epic road trips.

Luckily it's a mere 12 days until we see her again.

The first time I saw Caitlin, she was decked out in Gothic attire and scared the hell out of me. I met her again a few days later and found out she was Bry's stand partner. I was afraid for her. It wasn't until that weekend that we bonded over RENT and became BFF's. We spent two years doing just about everything together until she moved back home. 

Day 29 - A picture of something that makes you smile.

Nick Pitera

You are a monster if listening to THIS doesn't make you smile. Go on. I'm waiting. Click the link and listen to it. DO IT. Then give THIS a watch, too. I promise it's worth your time.

Day 28 - A picture of something you're afraid of.

There isn't just one thing we're afraid of. There are, in fact, four main things that we are both afraid of.

Being alone.

The dark.

Deep, dark water.

Seaweed

If you were to combine all four of these together, there is only one possible outcome:

Day 27 - A picture of you and a family member.

Been there, done that. Honestly, how hard is it to find just one picture of you and someone else in your family?

This, though, is a feat. Our Grandpa between us? We hadn't seen him in person in 13 years. The cousins to my left? We hadn't seen them in TWENTY years. Kind of hard getting our family together. We should get on that, guys.