Somniloquence, or Monkey's Ticked Off At Me Again:

As I have frequently related here, I have a repeated issue with insomnia. As I have to get up at 7:30 every day during the week (at least this month), I'm medicated for it on those nights when I have to get up early. Lunesta is some good stuff, aside from the side effect of making everything I drink taste like crap.
However, that doesn't explain the annoyed-ness of the Monkey. Apparently Lunesta is better that I thought; it was strong enough to keep me sound asleep when, at about 2 this morning, I shouted, "I'm coming," and woke up my poor, long-suffering roommate. (and yes, I realize other interpretations of such a statement...I was very confused and startled when Monkey first told me). I've had a lot of dreams about home recently, so I guess I was answering an imagined summons.

Re: my posting habits...I really, really should stop posting in the early A.M. hours. Monkey (one of an estimated 2 readers) went back last night and read through a bunch of posts she'd missed... and caught a buttload of misspellings and other assorted typographical errors.
Brilliant. Really.

::*WARNING* Some movie SPOILERS for "Sweeney Todd" after this point::

Ooh!!! I got to see "Sweeney Todd: Demon Barber of Fleet Street" on Friday! I did (most of) my laundry, and when the last came out, we went over to one of the local cinemas and wheeeeeeee, movie! I'd been looking forward to this movie for a number of reasons: Johnny Depp, Alan Rickman, Helena Bonham Carter, and all of the above SINGING.
"Sweeney Todd" is a slasher musical.

When we got back, after watching Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett slitting/stabbing throats and cooking people in pies respectively, the only comment Monkey and I had was that the blood was not exactly realistic (she said it was too watery or inconsistent, I said it was too bright, and held up my BBQ sauce as a closer example).

A random thought: TV is stupid. Especially the commercials. One that just let up went like this: "We couldn't say it on TV if it wasn't true! Eat all you want and still lose weight!" and on and on ad nauseum about some or the other die(t) product.
Honestly, my first thought in response to their first sentence was, "Um, it's election year, what about them apples?"

I found someone from whom I can get a much cheaper copy of a book for a major class next year, so off I go to do that and check what else I'm gonna need for the other 4 classes for which I do not yet have books.

A bientot. (and again, I wish I could get accent marks....*sigh*)
~Brill

Gads.

I so do not post often enough. I think about it. Seriously, I'll be walking to class or in lunch or in the shower or I'll just randomly hear something funny or interesting or something something-ish, and I'll think, "Hey, I should write about that in my blog!"...and then I never do. Grr.
Well, current/new things about me:
-January term class is in session, so I'm fitting 4 months of drawing into one month. This means my butt hurts. Not directly, but the benches in the classroom look like this:

l
l
l___________
l-------------------l
l...................l

WITH NO CURVE OR CUSHION!! (...and yes, that is drawn in l's & punctuation).
I go home next weekend. Hopefully, S can give my back muscles a massage. I hurt from scalp to sacroiliac.

-My laundry pile reached a new high (or low, in Monkey's opinion). I've been rather caught up in this fracking class, and hadn't yet unpacked my clothes from over break.... or done the rather massive amount of laundry that piled up as a result.
As of today, my laundry reached my boobs. I'm going down to the laundry facilities when I get off of here; it's sorted into piles on the floor, taunting me. Ideally, I'll do the impressive pile of dishes sitting on my counter when the laundry is in the machines. (I need to...I'm out of forks, most of my bowls, soup/cereal spoons...It's an early, long, labor-intensive class, and I'm an otherwise lazybum!)

-Monkey has discovered the investive potential of Roth IRAs. Or, rather, has recently further investigated them and brought them to my knowledge. Since my bank waives the fee associated therewith for checking account holders, I may set one up if I get a good enough job this summer.

-I am PASTY!!! Earlier today I was unable to determine if a dark area on my temple was a long smear of charcoal or veins under my skin. I think it's the later, though I'm still not certain.

-Oh, the first weekend (or any time, really) that the weather has finally been consistently precipitant... and our art class has to spray fixative on charcoal drawings before Monday, a strictly outdoor process.

-I saw this this morning:
http://www.comics.com/comics/chickweed/
It's the first comic in my lineup. Dr. Burber's comments just brightened my day, as usual.

I'm going to do laundry...and dishes...and then NOTHING PRODUCTIVE at least until Friday night!

The Return

School again, School again, coughety-cough....
Well, I am back in College Town, with a rather persistent head cold from Mum. This will be the 3rd semester in a row that I've been sick the first week of classes. Thankfully I still have some nasal spray from last semester.
Christmas, New Year's home-cooked (and me-cooked) food...one would think I'd gain weight while at home, but nooooo.....The odd and rather inexplicable trend towards weight loss continues. Thus far since the commencement of my freshman year I have lost approximately 20 lbs., 5 during the winter break. This is friggin' weird. I need to find a way to give the extra weight to Monkey; she constantly complains of being too light. The girl almost never tips the 100 mark, and you can't give blood unless you're at least 110 lbs. (We had a blood drive here near the beginning of school, and each class got points for however many mambers would participate....poor Monkey.)
Speaking of Monkey, she got 3 presents thusly themed for Christmas, and told me that her mother and I almost got her the same thing! She and I went food shopping last night after we got in, cleaned the room, and unpacked. I'm reducing my meal plan ASAP because quite frankly, my dears, the food here sucks. They can't even keep the milk properly cold all the time! I don't think that there is a single consistently good menu item...I'll have to ponder that. So we loaded up on microwavable frozen pasta dinner entres that I'd had while house-sitting for a former HS teacher...really rather good ones... and other shelf- or freezer-stable items. I have food. I am happy.
We both learned from a friend last night that day classes do not start today as we originally thought, but tomorrow; night classes start today (Thursday). My art class is only M-Th. I HAVE NO CLASS UNTIL MONDAY!!!!!!!! WOOHOO! It rather saddens me, though, that I didn't get to say goodbye to Mum & Da before I left.
Our room is now pretty and clean and SYMMETRICAL (enough)!
we moved the desks to in front of the big window, back to back, and turned our beds to create a small walkway between those two items of furniture. The dressers are both still in front of the closets, and I now have the fridge at the foot of my bed. (so on cold mornings I can just crawl to the foot of the bed under the covers and root around for food! Brilliant! :P)
OHOHOH!!!! I saw Le Batard! he is WALKING, He is HOME (as in his house, not our town), and apparently he's coming back to school for the Spring term! Full recovery is still projected at around a year, but he's made an astounding recovery thus far. I'm so thankful!
OK, going away. I need to go and see if the others for whom I've made biscotti packages are here, and officially tell the cafeteria that they suck....er, that I won't be eating there more than 12 times per week.
Au revoir!

~Brilliant (or something)

Insomnia Strikes Again, or I Can't Remember Jack

My newest fashion accessory: the bags under my eyes. Insomnia (or internal clock set 4 hours west) and hair-trigger wakefulness (my squeaky bed wakes me up)= No restful sleep. It's 1:25 A.M. eastern now, and everything south of my head is very awake. I am exhausted, but due to my wonderful med separation system at college, my insomnia meds (not a nightly requirement) were not with the others when meds went into the suitcase. And Tylenol PM does squat for me. Soooo...Hi. These last 2 nights I devoted to the perusal of The Devil's Panties web comic (I'd been thru most of the fanfics I had been trawling...twice. I need new sites). It's one I've been meaning to get to, but haven't had the time. Whee, time.
Currently I'm sleeping (or, heavily and intermittently dosing) from between 2-3 A.M. and 10 A.M. to 12 P.M. (If I'm lucky). But as is usual, the time is full of some VERY vivid dreams (what Technicolor's role model wants to be when it grows up) with the most outrageous and sometimes disturbed plot lines. Sleep deprivation does very weird things to me, but chief among them is that it obliterates the last vestiges of the filter between my brain and my mouth, and pushes up some utterly oddball stuff from said brain. Things like "5-year-old found in grain of sand."
All of my dreams last night had the newest song from Nickelback, "Into the Night," as a background track. The last dream the day before before Mum's pounding got through the earplugs was Carolina Beach music my brain supplied (I loathe, abhor, disdain, and utterly despise Carolina Beach music) along with....graphics. Have you ever seen Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Imagine the cars, buildings, etc. in Toon Town the first time the detective goes in, when they're all singing and dancing back and forth. Now translate that to real life. I was rather glad to be awakened.

I WANT MY DELTA SLEEP!!!!
I'm going to listen to the Nickelback song in its entirety to see if that will get it to go away.

Ooh, now I have "An Englishman in New York" rattling around....

~I'm a BRILLIANT!
("A brilliant what?")

Regression

OK, maybe not regression, per se. However, Monkey and I did visit our old HS Wednesday. It was their last day of classes, and our official excuse (used to get past the flying protocol-Nazi monkeys in the front office) was that we came bearing Frankincense, Myrrh, and color-annotated, time-analyzed maps of our county for our old Psych teacher. OK, maybe not the first two, but the last one we did have, courtesy of Monkey's Dad. They looked really cool.... Anyway, we had a note from said Psych teacher, and after I handed over my keys, they gave us passes and allowed us to proceed. Seriously, I can understand wanting to enforce stricter regulations, but some of the stuff they've started doing is just a bit oddball, IMHO.
We went up to see Psych teacher, then made the rounds and dropped off presents (biscotti for all from me, one specific thing to our old AP English teacher from Monkey).
It became a tradition of sorts in my freshman year to give each of my teachers a bag of biscotti, homemade, at the end of each semester. The first year Mum made it, but every year after I did. This came in handy (I suppose) last year when Monkey's and my Journalism class had a bake sale solely aimed at the teachers. We provided a menu of baked good available for order, then they ordered. Fairly straightforward. Except for the part where I got about a hundred pieces of biscotti worth of orders. Our illustrious teacher had shared his with two colleagues, and one afternoon we had entered the class to find the following written on the board:
"Can you freeze biscotti?"
I did not recognize this question for the imminent doom it represented. Having just thought of a perfect (for me) response, I walked to the board and wrote, "No, you have to boil it." When the teacher entered the room I replied that yes, like any other baked good it was perfectly freezable.
Doom.
When he handed out the baking orders (this was a self-funded club, hence the necessity of the beake sale), I got 2 orders for Devils Food cakes (Monkey, in her eternal wonderfulness, took one of those. I love her), somewhere between 21 and 32 orders of biscotti (of two DIFFERENT kinds, 3 pieces per order), and I also had to make PB cookies.
That's what I get for spreading around food for 4 years and signing up to make so much stuff(see 4th label).

Today, The Flower and I went over to the local rehabilitation center and saw Le Batard. He is WALKING! I had talked to him on the phone and he'd tod me this, so I knew it intellectually, but to see him walking, and (aside from being a bit more irritable and having braces on his neck and torso) back to himself is a whole different thing!
That, and he is still able to tickle attack me and make sexual jokes about everyone around him. He is definitely back to normal.

The Flower and I are going with her BF & friend to see I Am Legend now...Da saw it & I wanna...and I got the savings bond I was waiting on, so I have the money :D.

Au Revoir!
~Brilliance and Light!!!!

Stuff

Gads, I don't post frequently. I would blame it on no time, as has been the reason most days, but as I spent ALL of yesterday (daytime) reading HP fanfics...that excuse goes out the window. Me being a lazybum again!
I have pretty words. I love large, abnormal, and abstract words. One of my goals is to have at least 2 bookshelves full of books by the end of my college career, though I don't know if that includes grad school or not. I am in a BA Studio Art program now, and after I graduate I intend to enroll in an MAT (or MTA...it's one of the two) program. From the description my advisor gave me, it's a teacher Masters program for those who don't get a BA in Education. The ideal career in which I visualize myself would be as a professional artist, but since I also like to eat, I'm going into teaching (it's either that or get a Sugar Daddy...:P).
I only desire to teach High School level; I despise, loathe, disdain, and abhor Middle School spawn, especially those of the female persuasion. They are vicious, conniving little things, and I think they should all be locked up at the age of 11 and released 3-4 years later...after much 're-education.' Nor do I have the desire to attempt to teach those spawn, commonly referred to as 'Elementary-age' which have not yet completely mastered the concepts of bladder control, peristalsis, or keeping their smaller appendages out of various and sundry orifices.
Opinions? Me? How dare you accuse me of such things?

On a slightly lighter note, I got my grades these past few days from my first semester as a College Student! They go as follows:
Art History: A
Yoga (history, concepts, principles, and practice): A-
2-D Design: B+
Precal: A-
Western & Eastern Civ: B
The most shocking of these (closely followed by Yoga) is my Precal. I seriously anticipated a B- or C+ in that class. Math is SO NOT my forte, and most of my quiz grades from the class looked like "2/12," "3/7," et cetera. I also didn't study for the final. At all. You can imagine my shock. Of the 3 test beforehand, all were high B's, but still....
As for Yoga, the only other solid grade I had in the class -as in on paper- was a C, and that was the midterm. Meh, I guess she liked my book review!
Both the W/E Civ and the Art History are the first half of 2-semester courses. Whee.
OK, I'll stop rambling about school...I am free of their clutches until early January.

Our Christmas tree went up last night, 8 days before Christmas. Two days before, I "minionized" (commandeered) Buster (aka Twitch) and we cleaned that blasted excuse for a living room. You can actually see FLOOR now! (Granted, it is hideous, mottled, dog-and-small-annoying-child-ruined carpet, but damnit, it is CLEAN dog-and-small-annoying-child-ruined carpet!)
Da said that he'd cut the carpet out after the tree comes down. I hope so, though I relish not the thought of what the flooring under the carpet looks like.

Hanging the ornaments last night I stumbled across a bell-shaped one with the quote, "Every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings." I showed it to Mum, and .... Have you ever read the children's book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie? Well, if you give the Mum an It's A Wonderful Life allusion anywhere near the vicinity of Christmas, you need the movie to play for her. I swear, the woman can quote the bloody thing front and back. Not that I criticize the movie; it is a wonderful piece of cinematic art and one of the few B&W movies that I truly adore (and one that I simply MUST get the Monkey and the Flower to watch, the poor deprived souls). Her devotion thereunto rivals mine to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, quote-wise.

OK, I shall now return to my lazybumness. The Kleptomaniac Demonspawn, aka Diva, is home from School today because she fell hard on her ribs at a party down the street last night and isn't feeling well. As it is doubtful that the boys will emerge from their room until I attempt to sleep (as they did last night), I am quasi-in charge.

A bientot, mes amis. (damn, I wish I could do accents on here!)
~I am Brilliant...or Something

Very briefly (but look what happened last time I said that)

Exams are DONE (for me, at least). We leave tomorrow (wait, today) for home after the Monkey finishes her chem exam. Today was art for me...history (through Gothic) then 2D Design class. I finished that final piece about 2 minutes before the class started. I am very pleased with it, though. It has monkeys. And trees. And other rain-forest-y things.
Later (after sleep) I shall do laundry -I estimate 3 loads- and packing. Last time I went home it was a bit...nippy. I had neglected to bring anything warmer than a t-shirt. This time I am making a packing-to-go-home and a packing-to-return list this time. My track record just sucks that bad.
Having had crap for sleep and even worse crap for food for the past few days, I shall now depart for realms somnolescent, soporific, and possibly even somnifacient, if I am lucky. Given my propensities thereunto for a number of years, I may even practice somniloquence.
(I'm having fun with the online dictionaries, if you can't tell...I have no hardcopy version of my own, but online ones are a hell of a lot of fun).
~Brilliance and Light

(The last tag does NOT refer to sexual relations with books, regardless of what college classmates may imply).