Cheap Like Your Mom

Eclectic. I think that pretty much describes it. Yep. Eclectic.

Monday, October 31, 2005

Generic update

I went home this weekend. It was great. My parents set up this whole dinner thing at the Buca Di Beppo, and it was supposed to be a few people, including Rob and Karen, Jack and Nora, and my grandparents who just came down from North Carolina for the winter. However, the hurricane forced some of my family from south Florida out to other places, so there ended up being another seven family members there: my grandparents on the other side, my Aunt Donna and Uncle George (the doctor who harasses me about being a lawyer, but in good fun), my Aunt Robin, and her two children, Michelle (12), and Amber (4). It gave a kind of preview of the wedding, with different social groups blending, and it was good. Of course, the thing they bonded over was the same thing everyone bonds over, making fun of me. But that's ok. half the time when I make a joke it is making fun of myself. Anyway, I won't be back home again until winter break, because finals eat poo. It actually coincides nicely with Rob's expected lack of Halo. Perhaps when I need a study break, I will pick up the guitar again instead. I have gotten into playing again a little, but I really want to get back into writing. I may have to tie down Adam and Janelle to be guinea pigs for songs. Or maybe I could just play for the actual guinea pigs. Peace out, word to your mothers, and Happy Halloween!

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Yay

Yesterday I actually asked my Evidence professor to be a reference for me. I have never asked a professor for this kind of thing before, mostly because I generally don't become close with teachers. They teach, I listen, we each go to our respective homes. It was surprisingly simple, though. I asked, she agreed, I beamed all the way home. Anyway, I went Monday night to help Jason do a hardcore cleaning of Firehouse before the founders of the company came by Tuesday morning, and I have to send out a super, king-kong, mega, mega thank you to Adam for recording The Ultimate Fighter for me. It was a great fight. More details about the fight by request, I'm sure most people don't care all that much. To close, two questions: Is "The Entity 'Bob'" a "person", in the "legal person to be in Botticelli" sense (Kevin and I were bored helping Jason clean)? Secondly, throughout the last week or so I have been watching the original Star Wars trilogy, and a question occured to me; is verisimilitude so important as to go back and alter classics in order to obtain greater verisimilitude (Rob specifically, since he brought it up, but everybody else too, of course)? Peace out, word to your mothers!

Friday, October 21, 2005

Old Business and New (Warning: May include Halo talk)

As for old business, someone asked why my journal is named "Cheap Like Your Mom." Well, back when I was first starting playing music with Matt and Kevin, Matt and I thought that "Cheap Like Your Mom" would be a great name for the band. Kevin disagreed, and when Jared and Angela joined, they too disagreed. The vote being three to two against, we did not name ourselves "Cheap Like Your Mom," and instead decided upon "False Impression." Since then I have wanted to call something "Cheap Like Your Mom," and this (and my other webjournal) are available. At least until there are children to name. Just kidding (obviously, I hope).

As for new business, yesterday was a little lame. Not really a bad day, because nothing significantly bad happened. Just a lot of annoying stuff. I was a little late to my first class, but what really got to me was what happened an hour in. I had been paying attention, but I started thinking about the topic, mostly about how you would go about proving the exception he had been talking about, and all of a sudden he called my name. "Yes?"
Apparently that was the wrong response. I sat there and he just stared at me. It didn't take me long to realize that he had asked the question before calling my name. "Do you even know where we are?"
"Ummm?" I knew where we were a couple minutes ago, but we were at the end of discussing a case, I wasn't sure if we had moved to the next one, and I was for some reason afraid to chance it.
"Well for starters, Mr. Gardner, we are in Immigration Law, that's the blue book, by Legomsky."
Silence. I was waiting for him to repeat the question, since he had made it obvious that he knew that I didn't know what he had asked. After what felt like forever, but was really probably a minute and a half, he called on someone else. I talked to him after class, and I am not sure whether this makes it better or worse, but he apparently thought it was funny. He smiled and joked about it with me. I was truly confused.
The rest of the day was actually allright, but my first class loomed over my head and rained on my whole day. Then on the way home, I almost got hit twice. When I got home, I wanted to kill some people, so I got on Halo, and sucked horribly. It was very frustrating. It's most frustrating when you know that you are not performing as well as you could. So I stopped after three games, and decided I needed to take a nap and wake up like it was a new day. After an hour nap I woke up with a headache.

Luckily it went away almost as soon as I got up and started walking around, and the day did get better, as I had dinner with Adam, and it was the first time I ever enjoyed tuna salad. Then we played Halo with Erin. We didn't start until 9:30 or 9:45, but we had a lot of fun. We also did really well. I know that a good kill/death ratio is not the point of a capture the flag match, but when someone on the other team is bragging about his, it makes me feel warm and fuzzy on the inside to be able to point out calmly to him that I had both more kills and fewer deaths than him, even if we did tie in flag captures.

So today I went to class, which was uneventful, and then to work, which was also uneventful, except that Kevin let me off about 45 minutes early. So I came home, and played a little Halo again, just one game. One game is all it took. Everyone in the rumble pit match was higher rank than me (except one who was the same rank), and I destroyed them. Technically I only won by one kill. But I also had significantly fewer deaths than anyone on the board, and I ran a riot (killed ten people in a row without dying) with a sword/sniper combo. I figured that I wouldn't be able to do any better than that, so I put it away, and started writing this.

Sorry if the Halo talk was a little esoteric, but it's been pretty much the high point of the last day or so. Except of course for talking to Erin, and Adam's cooking. Peace out, and word to your mothers!

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Is America just bored?

In the last 24 hours, I have seen four reports on a school that is not having their prom this year, and three on the record high Powerball Lottery prize. I also saw an add for a drug that purports to treat "restless leg syndrome." I really don't watch that much television, either. Wait a second, I am in the student lounge and another report on the Powerball Lottery just came on. Seriously. Is there that much of a lack of substantial news that this is what they have to report when there isn't a Katrina to occupy their airwaves? Or is it just the capitalistic motive to show what people want to see, so they can get more ratings and more money? Are they intentionally avoiding the international stories that most americans have never heard of, or are those stories just not profitable?
The restless leg syndrome thing confuses me too. I'm sure that this drug will help some number of people with this syndrome, but I can't shake the feeling that if I were a medical researcher, I would feel kind of silly working on something like this rather than cancer, diabetes, even migraines. Medical researchers can't possibly be bored. It is obvious that there isn't a lack of more substantial diseases and conditions to attempt to cure. Is it just more profitable to research something that you are pretty sure that you can find a cure for and market for than to funnel more money into cancer research that is still a longshot for finding a cure in the near future? Is there anything to the theory that the drug companies don't want there to be a cure for cancer or AIDS because it is more profitable to sell a hundred different drugs for the symptoms for the rest of one's life than to sell a one time drug that cures? Seriously there's like a million different questions here, and I truly want to know what y'all think. (Yes I know I just used "y'all" but if you can think of a better, more clear and concise second person plural pronoun, then please tell me.)
Wow. Sorry that was so rambling, but I am in my long, boring break on my long, boring day. Peace out, word to your mothers.
Also, as I was proofreading this, CNN reported that one of their producers just got engaged. They seriously spent a full minute on it, which is a lot, considering.

Tuesday, October 18, 2005

Verbal Boxing

Jon Stewart just interviewed Bill O'Reilly. Wow. Just thought I'd let you all know. They'll probably show the re-runs all day tomorrow, and they have archives on the website too. Peace.

A new supreme court appointment.

Today I was made the interim Florida State University Student Government Supreme Court Justice. They needed a fifth to make quorum for their case next week, so even though my application hasn't gone through yet, I got appointed. I thought that was pretty cool. Anyway, peace out and word to your mothers!

Monday, October 17, 2005

Success.

I have registered. I had to drive back to my place to get my checkbook, and then back to the school again to take care of my hold, but after another hour since then, I finally got through the system and am registered. However, my 2 hour class on dissolution of marriage is apparently 3 hours, according to the system, even though I just double checked the course catalog and it still says 2. Whatever, I am registered, and happy about it. Peace out, word to your mothers.

Don't know what you got 'til it's gone.

I never thought I would miss USF's administration, but then, I never knew it could be messed up as badly as FSU has. Apparently, everyone registers at the same time, a procedure that, if it were not done electronically, would surely cause a riot. At 8 a.m., they just yell "GO!" and inevitably overload the servers. I woke up at 7:30 to make sure I was ready at 8:00, and was promptly told that I needed to wait ten minutes and try again. After about twenty attempts, the message changed and told me that I had exceeded the maximum number of logins, and that I should call the system administrator. So I did. He told me that this meant that the maximum number of people were on the server at one time. Almost as soon as he started talking I realized that that's exactly what the message meant, but man was it written unclearly. Anyway, I continued trying to log in until 9:00 when I had to leave for class. After class, at 11:00, I finally got into the system. I went to register for my classes finally, and I was baffled to see that they think I owe them money. A lot of money. So I immediately went and tried to figure out why. I went to the site via the link that explicitly stated "click here to see your registration hold" and it said merely "you have a hold because you owe us [a whole lot of money]." This was incredibly redundant and thus not very helpful, so I called the phone number shown on this new screen. I got through, which is the first major obstacle, and was greeted by an automated voice that took me through five or ten minutes of menus, and when it finally transferred me to the office that I presume could have helped me, I received a busy signal. I will now go back and attempt to find another way to figure out why they think I owe them money, because they totally took my tuition out of my loan already. I don't know. Whatever. Hopefully my classes will still be open when I finally wade through the sea of red tape that is currently attempting to strangle me. Peace out, and word to your mothers.

Sunday, October 16, 2005

Yargh.

I can't get my links to work. I feel dumb. I am going to go to bed because tomorrow morning I have to register for my next semester of law school classes. Peace out, word to your mothers.

Word Up.

Word. I felt a little silly posting things in one system that were essentially inside jokes to people in another system entirely. For instance, Matt, Kevin, etc. would probably not have appreciate my subtlely referring to Mr. Bento as T.H. Also, these ones look cool. Hopefully, I will update this one more frequently, but more likely I will just post one version on Livejournal, and one version here, each designed for it's own target audience. Peace out, and word to your mothers.