Vampires aren't so bad

You know how people talk about classic literature like they're great, but when you had to read them in English class in high school, they were terrible? Like Great Expectations? Or Catcher in the Rye? How did some of these things get to be classics? If I met Holden Caulfield in person, I guarantee I would want to hit him. But then again, he wouldn't be the first fictional character for whom I have a heaping dose of contempt. That honor goes to a certain bi-polar train who went from painful lack of self-confidence to an excess of smugness after completing the task he was designed to perform. I think you know who you are, train.

I have discovered one of those books, however, that escapes this unfortunately common bit of literary boredom. I have, of course, found many others, but this one in particular made me want to speak out. You might remember this from a previous entry, but it has had a rather healthy impact on me: Dracula. It is excellent. I was warned that Frankenstein (note: not the young variety) was a pretty boring book, so I had my doubts. I'm not quite finished, but I am pretty sure that they kill the Count. Which is kind of weird, when you think about it, because he can do pretty much anything awesome at night but is pretty useless during the day. So how hard would it be to make sure that nobody can mess with you during the day? It does kind of sound like it's shaping up to be a little bit of the vampire version of Wile E. Coyote, though.

Anyway, he's still a pretty awesome villain. Way better than Frankenstein's Monster. This book has one of the coolest images I have ever read in the commandeered ship's captain (I don't want to give away too many details) and he drugs the help of one of the women that he feasts on with laudanum. Anyone who uses laudanum is automatically awesome. Case closed.

Invented by Terrorists: Pay Wi-Fi

I went to Starbucks this evening, because I have not yet discovered a local coffeeshop that does not require me to drive like 8 miles. I recognize that it is a Friday and I am doing a rather solitary activity, but it's the weekend before Thanksgiving and everyone I know is out of town. I mean that in the most literal sense possible; every single person I know is not in town right now.

But I went over to the Maw of the Beast and bought myself an ironically named tea -- Awake -- and opened up my laptop, connected to the wireless network and couldn't figure out why my AIM client wouldn't log in. The reason, it turns out, is that they make you pay for it now. I have just one question: What do I look like, a gullibull? Thumbs down, my friends, thumbs down.

Guess what else: it's really expensive. They wanted to charge me $10 for 24 hours of connection on their precious network. That's like half the cost of the service for the month. I'm already paying twice as much as I should for a mediocre Grande tea, (I know they've been doing this forever with their Italian and what not, but I never understood why the middle size is large) and you want me to shell out more money to use the internet? It's like they think they're a bar. Except people go to bars to get rejected by women. There were only high schoolers at this Starbucks and they didn't even have a hot bartender. Or barista. I forgot where I was in this analogy.

I heard on the news today that Starbucks is suffering from a decline in customers for the first time in like forver. That's what happens when you screw people. All those years of successfully trying to take over the world got to your head, didn't it Starbucks? Well look at you now. You'll be like that hot girl who never got into serious relationships because her life was going so well and her career was too good, but it all came crashing down when she couldn't keep up with expectations and got involved with coke and will die bitter and alone, with a face and body wrecked by all the hard livin'. You won't get any sympathy from me, Starbucks. Not this time.

We're all living in a material world and I am a material girl (or boy)

I had my first on-site interview of my graduate career, so I have been busy this past week. I flew into Washington, DC (my first time there) and saw the Capitol all lit up and the Washington Monument in the distance... all from the tiny, tiny window in the airplane on the taxiway. I would have liked to get a slightly closer view, but I didn't really have time for that. I had roughly 1 hour of unscheduled time that didn't have to be spent driving, so getting in and out of Reagan-National to the Mall just wasn't in the cards.

This started to get me thinking about having real money, as opposed to graduate student money, which is largely imaginary. They try to convince you that since you get tuition for free that you're really making $40k more than you're actually getting paid, and here's what I have to say to that: bunk. Christmas and my birthday just happened, though, so I'm financially secure for a little while at least. One of the things that comes up a lot is the living arrangements, since it would be awfully grand to have a little more room to put my useless junk. Buy or rent is a big question, and it's one of those that makes you realize you've transitioned from interesting, young person into a boring adult. Next I'll be talking to people about interest rates on investments. Good Lord, now I remember why I went to grad school to avoid this in the first place.

Anyway, the fun things are that I can start to think about what I want to put into that house. Since I'm going to start making something like 5 times what I currently make at any job, in my estimation, that's essentially limitless funds. Wondering if I should get the SNL DVD box set this month or next month will seem a little trivial. At least I hope so. But there are things that I think I want in my so-called "dream house" that without them would really fall short of my "dream." So, basically, here is a list of things that I will consider my life a monetary failure if I don't have them in one of the houses I will eventually live in:

• Water fountain - For some reason, water just tastes better to me when it comes out really cold in a water fountain. Unless it's an old fountain, then it reminds me of the older gym I used to play basketball in when I was younger, which made everyone wonder if the metal in the pipes was being entrained (we probably wouldn't have used this word then) into the flow (sorry, engineering thinking coming out) and into our mouths. Almost made going thirsty seem preferable.
• Urinal - Honestly, if you went into someone's bathroom and found a urinal, wouldn't you be intrigued? It would be really convenient and probably save a lot of water in the long run, so in my laziness I'm really trying to help save the world.
• Fireman pole - This would be way more awesome than stairs. The only trouble is that I would need stairs to get back up anyway, unless I have like Batman (Adam West era) had with rocket powered launchers to carry me back up. Might be cost prohibitive, but I can think of nothing that would be more awesome than that.
• Toucan - For some reason, I've always wanted a toucan. And I think I would let him try to crush the skull of anyone with his absurd beak if they ask if his name is "Sam."
• Movie theatre - It wouldn't have to be very big, but it would be neat to have a small room with an overwhelmingly large television that's stadium seated. Maybe have room for 12 people or so, not too gawdy, but be slanted like the floors in a theater. We could watch movies in there, or just things like the news or, if I'm really bored, the Food Network. It seems like everybody's watching that these days and it would give me something to talk about.

I kind of already have that last one now; my roommate bought a hugous projector so I got to watch the National Championship game in nearly life size. I'm glad the Gators won, but I think I'm already getting tired of Gator fans. Anyway, it's about lunchtime and I'm going to go and pout since I can't get my drink from a fountain.

You're making quite a bit a' sport of me

I followed two sports over the past few weeks that I don't normally. You have already read about one of them, and the other is our so-called national pastime. The US team was eliminated in the World Cup and Clemson was eliminated from the College Baseball World Series. It's still two months until football season, so what am I going to do for the intervening time? Watch professional baseball? I'd rather eat the stuff at the bottom of my oven.

The soccer loss was a bit hard to take. I felt like I was forcing myself to watch it as a national service, choking down the programming the way a five your old would his cough medicine, trying to support the United States in a place where (surprise) everyone else hates us. We lost to Ghana. I don't really know much about Ghana, other than what its flag looks like and that the United States should never lose to them in anything. So basically, this would be like telling that five year old that the medicine he took was really just cooking oil. Not only did it make you wish for whatever disease it was supposed to prevent, but you might actually get that disease anyway. But soccer will be huge here in five years.

Baseball, on the other hand, is a little less effectual to me. I could go to Clemson games. They were fun, actually. Watching baseball on television is excruciating without a rooting interest. But since I am a Clemson student, I had one; UNC played a serious game and beat us. Then Cal State played us to the last inning and we came up short. It happens. At least it wasn't Ghana.

So back to the question - what am I supposed to do for sport in the time between now and opening day of football? ESPN has been showing paintball a lot, maybe I'll watch that.

Idleness, my kryptonite

People wonder what they'd if they didn't have to work. I'll tell you what they'd do, because I'm doing it: eat ice cream and play video games. My "job", which is to be a grad student, right now is about as exciting as the soccer game I tried to watch yesterday. (I didn't fail to watch the USA-Czech Republic match, but I would feel dishonest not prefacing "watch" with "try" because "try" implies discomfort. I just wanted to be sure that you understand that both my life and the soccer game were/are boring at the moment.) I am waiting on things to arrive, various quotes for work and free samples of parts. I am sitting at home watching MSNBC and writing this because there is literally nothing I can do in the lab. Well, that's not true; I can make fun of the Belorussian Ph.D.'s broken English. But really, I can do that here, too.