So I Put My Hands Up (And Promptly Clamped Them Over My Ears)

Let me start out by telling you that my exposure to Miley Cyrus up to this point was minimal. That's a difficult thing to attain when one lives in a household with two young girls. Fortunately, I conditioned them to understand that Hannah Montana might possibly be the anti-Christ, and to not watch her show. _{I hope you know I'm kidding about the anti-Christ part. She's probably Satan herself.} And so, my sisters developed into pretty decent tomboys, although they still like iCarly and the Suite Life shows, which I honestly can't say I mind, because I like them, too.
But my affinity for children's television isn't the subject of this blog. Miley Cyrus is. I have had to endure that retched 'Party in the USA' twice now, with absolutely no escape. For some reason, EIU plays it at football games over the PA system. I have stood amidst a crowd full of people that I had camaraderie with not seconds before--due to the matching T-shirts, face paint, and hoarse voices that are Panther Nation--and was baffled as to why they were waving their hands in the air to what sounds like a chipmunk gasping for air. Her actual singing voice sounds like the voice I do when I poke fun at pop singers. She literally sounds like a joke to me. I can't walk out of the stadium, because enough people already have; our team isn't exactly the greatest, but aren't we expected to cheer harder for them when they're down? Panther Nation is a pep club, which to me means that we cheer no matter what, not leave in droves when the game starts to suck. But that's a rant for a different day.
This isn't to say that college football games were my first exposure to Miley Cyrus; they were simply my first unavoidable brush with the little demon. The first Miley Cyrus song I ever heard was 'Can't Be Tamed', and I chose to watch the video because there was an article about it on Yahoo News that day. It appears to me that her video is an audition for the Junior Miss Lady GaGa pageant. Just as GaGa has been a tad too Madonna-esque lately--see 'Alejandro'--Miley has skanked it up with an unholy marriage of all things Lady GaGa and Britney Spears. It's creepy, and the little kids who once followed her don't like it. Seriously. However, that song is fathoms better than 'Party in the USA', and if they play at games, I might sing along. If Justin Bieber starts playing, though, I'll walk out, no matter how much the team needs me.
~Sushi

The Dorm Life of Freak and Sushi

NOTE: If and when my sister Ladybug ever reads this post, she will flip her shit for the title. She's completely obsessed with one of the twins on The Suite Life of Zach and Cody. Only one of the twins, though.

I am sitting at my school-sanctioned desk, drinking a cup of extremely strong, possibly radioactive coffee that I just reheated in the industrial microwave in the kitchen. The microwave hums whenever someone opens it, and it reminds me irrevocably of a nuclear reactor. My roommate, Freak, is either sleeping or staring at the ceiling, but she has promised pancakes whenever she emerges from her side of the room. Lately she has been taken with randomly singing like an aging black gospel singer, and the fact that she is neither black nor aging doesn't seem to bother her in the slightest. I've been looking at the website Regretsy for days now, because it makes me laugh at humanity, and because I still don't have a great deal of homework. All of these random sentences are culminating in a blog entry that I don't honestly see an end to. I could do this all day. Like I said, not much homework.
So, pretty much every day, I do the same thing. I wake up in the morning--not feeling like P. Diddy--around 8AM, so I have plenty of time to take a shower or check my mail before I head for class at about ten 'til 9. Most days, I have class for five straight hours, with no breaks, which is a total kill-joy, but I can't complain because I planned it that way. I have absolutely no reason to skip classes when they're back-to-back. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I have little to no classes, so I read, or do homework, or go to Wal-Mart. There's no mall or anything like that in Charleston, so it's either 'go to Wal-Mart' or 'wither away into nothingness from the boredom'. Maybe that's a tad extreme, though. I'll have plenty to do with the student organizations I've joined once school truly gets into gear.
I think my favorite part of living on campus is that fact that I can walk to the library in under a minute. And we have an amazing library; the entire fourth floor is A/V and music books, the first floor has an extremely eclectic graphic novels section that I am readily devouring, and really, it's just a beautiful building to behold. Not as gorgeous as Doudna, which I wrote about in a past entry, but still.
More about dorm life later; we're having a stand-up comedy marathon. Because someone is holding all of the Harry Potter movies in our library system hostage...
~Sushi

I Am Old.

So, yesterday I turned twenty. And I feel weird about being twenty, because I've had the -teen suffix for so long now. It was also weird not having my family around for the first time. However, I did get to party. The local LGBT group, EIU Pride, had their welcome reception yesterday, and not only did I go, but I also helped plan it and purchase food and decorations. I like to get involved. So, I was there for about three hours, and then I went back to the dorm to eat Jello and open presents. I got a signed picture of Leonard Nimoy, which is now hanging above my bed to watch over me. I also got the single weirdest CD I have ever heard of: "Spaced Out: The Very Best of Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner". The best track, of course, is 'Ballad of Bilbo Baggins', which Spock and I use to annoy the hell out of each other. In case you haven't been subjected to it yet, here you go. Dig that crazy bassoon! I also got some fun trinkets from my aunt in Southern Illinois; the bunches of matching oriental stuff made me smile.
For my birthday, despite the fact that it was yesterday, I will do a list of...
20 Things that Make Me Smile
_{In no particular order}
1. Babies laughing

2. Smiley faces in food

3. Playing cards

4. Rainbows

5. Watching scary movies with my dad

6. Halloween shopping

7. Being in love

8. Portal

9. Making avatars

10. Lolcats

11. Rush

12. Living with one of my best friends

13. Spock [my Spock, the original Spock, any Spock, really]

14. Tetris

15. Lady GaGa parodies that don't insult Lady GaGa herself

16. Singing

17. My mom

18. Rock Band

19. Lego versions of pretty much anything

20. Birthdays

Thanks for smiling with me!
~Sushi

A Benevolent Textatorship

Call me a whiner, but I'm concerned about the people in my generation being unleashed into the working world, particularly those who are going into my field, psychology. I think about ninety percent of the psych majors I've met absolutely terrify me. Not just because they're morons, and they don't actually care about other people, but also because they just can't seem to put away their damn cell phones. The typical psych major, as well as most of my other peers, has a general lack of regard for others. They will tap away on their cellphones, whether they are alone, or in a group of friends, or in the classroom where they are supposed to be learning about the nuances of their chosen profession. What is going to happen when these people look up, and see that the world has changed around them? That they are not the center of the universe, and that the rest of Earth's inhabitants don't revolve around them?
What I'm trying to say is this: would you want to deal with a therapist who snuck glances at a cell phone when you were trying to divulge your problems to them? When they were supposed to be paying attention to only you, and not the person on the other line? And what if that other person is a surgeon, who perhaps was texting away during the lecture that taught them how to perform the operation they need to do on the human being in front of them? I don't want any doctor from my own generation working on me. I'm afraid of them, and I'm afraid of literally everyone else my age, because of this reasoning.
I have sat in classrooms when literally everyone surrounding me was texting. And the teachers, despite what they have all said during syllabus week, do nothing. It's very distracting. That little 'tick tick tick' or 'tap tap tap' of a cell phone keyboard as the texter creates some abomination of grammatical errors to send to the recipient, who is probably also sitting in class, distracting someone else like me, while another teacher does nothing. It's sick. I think I'm going to stick by my plan in high school and become a hermit by age thirty. I despise cell phones; I hate having one, and I hate using them. I hate the fact that I had to get texting back on my phone, after blissful years without it, so that I can communicate with my friends who, God forbid, hopefully don't text in class.
I probably sound insane for saying all this, but somewhere, deep down inside you, you know it to be true. Think about it: college is the time when our minds are most malleable, when we condition ourselves to become our future selves. The texter is conditioning their belief system to include an allowance for texting when others are present. In other words, their moral system states that it's perfectly fine to ignore the people in their presence in favor of a person that could be miles away, in the form of a small, technology-packed telephone. What about the people who will depend on these texters to make them well? And in the case of educators, what about the children who depend on these people to teach them? I fear that our world is doomed.

May Stephen King's glorious vision in Cell one day come true.
~Sushi