Laura's Universe

( READ THIS before you comment on any of my posts, and we will all be a lot happier. )
When posting your comments, please follow the Bigger Asshole Code of Conduct:
I get to be the bigger asshole on my blog.
I will define the terms “asshole” and “bigger” at my sole discretion.

If you are GBLT, or you or your child is considered a "tomboy" or "sissy boy," you need to read this NOW. Forward it to your friends. WE NEED TO STOP THIS SHIT.

When April was half-over and I still looked like Nosferatu, I had no problem with my mother's suggestion that I go to a tanning salon. After all, we're heading to FL at the end of the month to look at houses (yes, we're moving), and then to Italy in July, and tanning now will save me a lot of nasty sunburns later.

Fast forward to now. I am REALLY DARK. As in, I can run around naked after sundown and no one will see me. I wear black shirts and I still look darker than the shirts. I am mistaken for Beyonce on a regular basis, dark. (I am prepared to take pictures to prove it!)

Every day, even now that my tan puts most supermodels' to shame, Mom asks me, "Have you tanned today?" If the answer is no, she reminds me to do so tomorrow. Every day. If I come out of this looking like a raisin, I'm pointing it out next spring.

Our school library used to have a card catalog (remember card catalogs?). Now, the catalog is online, and the cards from the old catalog are in little boxes with pencils, conveniently located by the computers for your note-taking needs. I'm all for any system that keeps paper from being wasted, especially when the original note on the card was this:

Boileau-Despreaux, Nicolas, 1636-1711
search under
Boileau Despreaux, Nicolas, 1636-1711

That's right, there is a card stating that you should search for the un-hyphenated version of an author's name, rather than the hypenated version. I don't know which is worse, the fact that they felt the need to do this (surely most college students would be able to figure it out), or the fact that the old catalog probably had a card like this for EVERY SINGLE HYPHENATED NAME, instead of a single note above the card catalog. I guess the geniuses behind our school library didn't like trees much.

In response to the following quote:

"Dear Bloggers, there’s no such thing as fans on the Internet. You’re only popular as long as you display yourself as a mirror image of those you’re writing for. I think I’ve proven my point pretty well in that regard. Love, V."

Dear V,

Only 95% of people on the Internet act as if a single disagreement is the end of the world. The problem is, most of us will only attract one or two readers from the other 5%. I like to consider myself part of said 5%, but I also consider a hamburger with extra veggies and yogurt on the side to be a well-balanced meal, so my judgment may not be the most reliable on that score.
You will never hear from the 5% of discerning people on the Internet, because very few of them actually write to the blogs they read unless they know the author personally, or the author has made an astonishingly good point. (And the hole I've just dug for myself is now, probably, getting deeper. Especially since I just started a sentence with a conjunction.) Kudos on the standing-up-for-the-working-class thing, the white-trash-is-not-particularly-laudable thing, and the flaunting-your-wealth-is-sooooo-not-cool thing. I've had to bite my tongue on that sort of thing myself IRL myself.

Basking in my relative obscurity and my imaginary backyard trampoline,
L

Dear everybody else who reads this blog, especially those who fall under the aforementioned 95%,
I know this is going to be hard for many of you to take, but MOST PEOPLE YOU MEET WILL NOT AGREE WITH YOU ON EVERY SINGLE THING. In fact, you'll be lucky to find ONE, unless your life is so horribly shallow and empty that you simply believe in everything the idiot box in your living room (the TV, not your Armani-loving wife) says is right. If you are that shallow, I pity you quite a bit. It must be earth-shattering to have to hear Santa Claus is really your parents and the Easter Bunny didn't feed Christ painted eggs when He rose from the tomb, but sometimes we all need to hear things we don't agree with. Learning to evaluate our own beliefs and decide which viewpoint we can get behind is good for us. It keeps us from mentally stagnating.
And if you don't agree with anything a given blogger says, guess what? Nobody forced you to read his/her blog in the first place! Therefore, writing a disjointed email or MySpace entry stating "Blogger XYZ is a big fat meanie LIAR RAUUUUUUURRRRGH!!!" makes you look like the annoying three-year-old at the supermarket who won't stop crying because Mommy won't buy him a fucking fifty-cent candy bar. STOP IT. Your boss may be reading. The Internet is not a place you can just dump something on, with no regard for the possible consequences of your post. If you whine like a three-year-old in a supermarket, or you post pictures on your MySpace of how totally wasted you got last week, or you complain about how no one took your idea of Spend-the-Workday-Playing-Solitaire Day seriously and those horrible slave-drivers fired you for it, it will get around to your boss, make no mistake. It will be perused after every job interview. And those embarrassing pictures don't die, because people will copy and repost them somewhere else. As an Internet advice columnist once put it, "Once an Internet porn star, always an Internet porn star."

Sorry this entry is so long but it really needed to be said. Please read it, and do not make the mistake of believing it could not possibly refer to you--the odds are very good that it either does now, or has in the past.

Hoping the collective Netiquette improves,
L

I don't really know how to tell you this, but I'm in love with your sister. I think I realized it when we skinny dipped outside of Chicago and I saw you sit on the crazy monk. I'm sure you're scarred enough to understand that Santa doesn't exist. I'm returning your memories from the military service
to you, but I'll keep your left ear as a memory. You should also know that I always wanted to break Oprah Winfrey imitations.

Greetings to your freaky family,
L.

( To those who have no idea what's going on: )

Stolen from darkblood777

For those of you who don't watch CSPAN, a very interesting scandal has been recently brought to life. A high-ranking FAA official has been caught trying to cover up wide-spread corruption in a government sector that has sworn to protect the safety of American citizens.

When evidence of negligence by a certain safety inspector was brought to light the southeastern director of the FAA claimed first that this person was no longer in charge of any safety related work of any kind. This is a lie. Said individual was given an office position proofreading the flight manual.

The regional director also claimed as far as he knew, this was an isolated incident. This is also a lie. There is evidence that similar incidents have taken places in various parts of the country in the past few years.

Personally, I find it disturbing that a branch of the government whose primary function is ensuring that aircraft and their pilots meet certain standards for safety is clearly failing to do so. As many 3% of aircraft and an unknown number of commercial and/or private pilots do not meet FFA safety regulations. That may not seem like much, but consider the thousands of domestic and international flights to and from US airports every day.

If you or a loved one plan to go anywhere by plane in the near future, I would start praying now.

I've heard of children named Pearl Harper and Bill Dollar but some people should just stick to name registries when the time comes.

One of the reader submissions is the name "Shithead." No, really. Apparently, they pronounce it "Shi-TAYd."

There's an online ad for a certain cell phone company that you've probably seen. It shows an anxious bride and says "Letting her know you've got a flat tire and not cold feet matters." I'm glad cell phone companies recognize that we need good reception and do a pretty good job of providing coverage when you need it most. But there's one important issue that the telephone industry has totally neglected to address: people like me who are constantly leaving their cell phones at home.

You see, pay phones aren't nearly as common as they were just 10 years ago, because now, everybody has cell phones. Some people don't even bother with land lines anymore, and rely totally on cell phones. So why bother continuing to maintain pay phones that nobody uses anymore?

( I'm sure a lot of people can see where I'm going with this. )

1. Make sure you aren't wearing wool or synthetic materials so you don't have to worry about static. After all, you are Mr/Ms Fix-It, and you aren't about to let a little static electricity stop you! :D

2. Tear your entire tool shed apart looking for a soldering iron. Finally find it in the last place you would have ever thought to look. Swear.

3. Realize you have no electrical solder. Swear again. Drive to local home-improvement store.

4. Find the electrical solder. It is not in the electrical repairs section, it's hiding in Plumbing Supplies for some ungodly reason. Pay and head home.

5. Carefully clean the area you'll be working with. Remove any rings and dangling jewelry you may be wearing. Plug in the soldering iron and ready your solder. Coat the tip of your iron if necessary.

6. What's that smell? Oops, looks like you forgot to vent the fumes! Open a door or window.

7. Carefully touch tip of soldering iron to surface. When surface is adequately heated, carefully touch the solder to the surface so that a tiny drop melts onto your surface.

8. Funny, the solder seems to have stuck to your iron, instead of the surface you wanted it stuck to. Try again, being very careful not to touch the solder to the iron.

9. DAMNIT WHY WON'T IT STICK?!

10. Ten minutes later, finally succeed in putting the solder where you want it. Unplug soldering iron and wash your hands.

11. Allow iron to cool before putting it away. Make sure you don't touch the tip or you'll have to wash your hands agai--Shit I just touched the tip!

12. Wash hands again.

13. After several hours (overnight for best results) you are now ready to turn on your newly-repaired electrical device! You feel like a real, honest-to-goodness mechanic now!

14. Swear again, and call a repairman.

Today, I turned on my laptop, and after a few minutes of use, it gave me a "Battery Low" message. "That's odd," I thought, "I know I plugged it in." Sure enough, it is plugged in. The power brick's lit up, so the problem isn't the outlet. My computer shuts itself off, and it is several hours later that I finally figure out that the little prong in the AC power port is now stuck inside the end of the cable.

I panicked. I tried to pry the prong out with an unbent paper clip (an exercise in total futility). A classmate of mine says there is no way to remove a prong that gets stuck like that, that even the manufacturers can no longer separate prong from power cord. I cannot afford to repair or replace my laptop, or to buy a new battery or AC cable. (It's a Toshiba Satellite, bought in 2004. There are no third-party vendors that sell the parts, and Toshiba's replacement policy is "We have everything, but it'll cost you an arm, a leg, your firstborn, and your left breast/testicle.")

My quick fix idea is to very carefully put solder where the prong was originally attached, then shove the plug in quickly before it cools, thus permanently attaching the power cord to my laptop. I am not at all certain that this approach is going to work, but it's the only idea I can come up with.

Since this is a very risky procedure and not at all guaranteed to work, I am curious if anyone knows the supplies I would need to transform my laptop into an external hard drive. Despite the cursing and the begging ("pleaseohpleaseohPLEASE let it load this time!!"), I've gotten quite attached to my laptop over the past 3 years, and I would like part of it to live on. Also, that drive's got 60 GB of space, about 10 GB of which are in use. Most of that data is not backed up.

I'm beginning to think that I am cursed to have every piece of electronic equipment I own break down at the exact time at which I both badly need it and cannot replace it. Perhaps it's better that I didn't end up getting that Computer Engineering degree...

So yeah, Firefox auto-updated on me. And for some reason, email text fields and replies to other LJ's have shown a disturbing unwillingness to respond to the ' and navigational keys (Home, End, and arrows) since the update. It's working fine right now as I type this, but half the time it doesn't. I've never had this problem before. Is it Firefox, or does my connection just suck? (The fact that Hotmail sucks is pretty well-established and doesn't need to be mentioned.)

I was in the library, when a guy sat down next to me listening to Nightwish on his MP3 player. So I was mouthing the words, and he noticed. We started talking...He's an Ed major and seems like an awesome guy. We swapped contact info, because I don't want to lose track of him.

OMGOMGOMGOMG. You guys.

Patricia showed up in Adv Cal 2 today.

Also, my mother's birthday and Mardi Gras just so happened to coincide this year. Not that it matters, it's hard to come up with sins that are fun anymore.

Went clothes shopping over the weekend. ( Here's what I got: )

( Because men need to know this. )

And that's just modern underwear. I can only imagine what things were like in the age of corsets and hoop skirts.

A certain blog, which will go unnamed, has been flaming certain more popular blogs (which will also go unnamed--half of you probably already read them anyway) because they encouraged others to lose weight. The offending blog is run by a woman who thinks fat people are disliked solely because they are overweight in a society that values thinness. She also believes that obesity is entirely out of your control. If you're fat, you must just have the "fat gene" and that's all there is to it. Even if you have skinny relatives. Even if you haven't exercised in months.

I can't stand to see someone encourage that brand of stupidity, so I left a rather lengthy comment. It's probably not going to get past the screening process, so I'm posting it here. I haven't written any good advice to anyone in a long while, and I'd hate for it to go to waste.

( Save friendslists--cut your lengthy tirades TODAY! )

74% John Edwards
71% Barack Obama
70% Bill Richardson
69% Hillary Clinton
63% Chris Dodd
60% Mike Gravel
59% Joe Biden
57% Tom Tancredo
53% John McCain
51% Mike Huckabee
50% Dennis Kucinich
47% Mitt Romney
40% Fred Thompson
37% Rudy Giuliani
33% Ron Paul

2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz

Wow. I didn't realize I was quite that liberal...My parents would be upset if they knew. ;P

Just checked my junk folder to see if a certain email was accidentally filtered.

The subject line of one of the emails read, "Hi, unpunishable Phacrannacy." What is a Phacrannacy, and why is some random Italian guy calling me that? And who the hell thinks "Raffaello" is a good fake name? It's not even SPELLED right!!