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

Ready, Set, Please Don't Make Me Watch This Again!

When I was younger, I was absolutely mortified by a movie called The Halloween Tree. I can't even remember why, but I couldn't watch it without crying, and I've never seen the end. The reason I'm telling you this is because I happened across The Halloween Tree while doing a library search for media involving Leonard Nimoy but not Star Trek. [Taking Trek out cuts the list down by about 90%, in case you're wondering.] I had no idea Leonard Nimoy was in The Halloween Tree, because the last time I tried to watch it was at least a decade ago. So, I put the movie on order, mostly because I wanted to figure out why it's so damn terrifying, and of course, because Leonard Nimoy is, in my world, the human equivalent of God. The movie came in, I popped it into a VCR, and...
90 Minutes Later
I am almost twenty goddamn years old, and that movie is still scary as shit. But, now that I am an articulate adult, with a pen and paper sitting right beside me, I can tell you precisely why I was afraid to walk up my stairs in the pitch-blackness of my house after watching The Halloween Tree.
First off, it's a cartoon based on a book by Ray Bradbury. I've read a lot of Bradbury's work, and while I enjoy it, most of it is not suitable for children. He's a spooky guy, even if he's not exactly trying to be. Oh, he's also the narrator of the movie. The Halloween Tree also features one of the spookiest soundtracks I've ever heard for a cartoon; those vocalists haunted my nightmares. Then, after the intro, the children show up. These kids, apart from the token fatty, are skeleton-thin, and not just the one actually dressed as a skeleton. Then, when the kids gather into their little clique and realize their buddy Pip, the "greatest kid on earth," is missing, they take a trip through the forest from Snow White to get to his house. I am dead serious; this forest wanted to eat those kids alive. But all that weirdness seems minor when compared to Leonard Nimoy's character, Mr. Moundshroud. He is, among other things, a "scary yellow pointy magic bastard"--at least, that's what I have in my notes. When the bony kids make it to his house, which also wants to eat them, they see Pip, who is clear, climbing a tree growing pumpkins, which are apparently souls, and then flies away clutching a pumpkin that looks like his face. Oh, and a sidenote: in order to get Pip back, Moundshroud and the band of anorexic children must go to the "Undiscovered Country". Yes, like in Star Trek. Oh, and in order to get to the Undiscovered Country, they have to fly a time-traveling kite, made out of pieces circus posters that are alive and trying to eat them. Fun. Thankfully that gets torn to shreds when they land in Egypt. Okay, at this point in my notes, I wondered if I was just a sissy when I was little, and I decided to stop writing things down until I was truly spooked. But then, Moundshroud's cape turned into bat wings and he started to fly. Maybe every single thing that happens in this movie really is disturbing as hell. Later in the movie, in France, it is revealed that Moundshroud can't walk on holy ground. Is he the Devil, or the Grim Reaper or something? Nothing extraordinarily bad happens until they get to Mexico, during Dia de los Muertes. There we find Pip in a crypt, stuck in a giant spider web, surrounded by animated corpses. When the first of the skinny children tries to touch him, he turns to dust. I have pinpointed this as the exact point in the movie where I ran screaming from the room. Right about there. Well, not this time. This time I just watched in awe, wondering why the film was ever made. That, and why it features, among all those other frightening things, soul-sucking sugar skulls. Try saying that ten times fast.
Here, I made this for you:

~Sushi