merry christmas!

... which means it's time for my Christmas jet lag! :D

it's 5 AM and i'm sitting in my mom's kitchen, drinking root beer and watching Red Dwarf. I'm not even sure if this is jet lag anymore or just my body being all messed up from exams and stuff. But at least Zaheen is coming tonight so yay!

HIATUS OVER

guys i think the amount of deadlines i have this week (4) has had a strange effect on my choice of essay topic

also just so this isn't a completely wasted post, here's a picture of an ice cream truck (excuse me, 'ice lolly lorry') i took from my bedroom window

MIND THAT CHILD

ffffffffffff

Okay, I'm not EXACTLY back in the UK yet, but I've had a week or so of intense UK-related frustration, so I figure it counts.

About two weeks ago, I got a frantic message from one of my housemates next year that said, roughly, "I love you dear but if you don't pay the estate agents before Friday we're losing the house x Kat"

Yeah.

So, I got on the phone to the estate agents, who informed me that I owed them £720. Fair enough. I was aware of that. I paid the money over the phone, asked them if there was anything else I needed to do, they said no, I hung up and went to bed, as it was about 9am my time and I'd gotten up at around 4 to call. I got up later that day, only to find another frantic message from Kat-- apparently they're not giving anyone the keys... because I don't have a guarantor* and haven't signed the lease. But wait, hold on, I did both of those things back in April.

I can't say for SURE that they lost my paperwork and then pretended they didn't, but I certainly have suspicions. However, it turned out while getting my paperwork redone that my guarantor couldn't be a guarantor anyway (d'oh). So now I have no signature, am down $1200, and nobody to be my guarantor. Fuck. So I ended up calling a different office and talking to an entirely different person who was much smarter and more capable than the first person I talked to, who managed to finangle it so I could not have a guarantor at all and just pay three months up front. Why having a guarantor at all is necessary, I have no idea, but everyone got to move in just fine and everything was solved. Except for the fact that it took four days and my sleep cycle is beyond fucked. How did these people manage to run an empire again?

* someone who signs a piece of paper saying that you will pay your rent. I have no idea why this is necessary. I assume it's purely to add another layer of useless suffering on the already-suffocating morass that forms the bureaucracy that is somehow the UK government.

Chinese Girl Mess Two: Electric Bugaloo

So. Packing is hard, isn't it? You have to get all your clothes and books and pots and pans and stuff, wrap them carefully so they don't get broken, put them in boxes... it takes so long!

Which is, I suppose, why Chinese Girl didn't bother to do any of it. She left it all here.

Yep. She left early this morning, suitcase in hand. Waved goodbye and was out of our lives forever. Her rice cooker, however, is still present (and full of cooked rice). Her weird dried shrimp things are all over the counter, her bowls and plates are still half-full of... something warm and milky. In a way, it's fitting that a girl who became known to us through her messes, rather than any actual personal interaction, slipped away quietly, leaving nothing behind but a giant pile of dirty dishes and rotting food that we now have to dispose of for her, lest we get charged. Farewell, Fang, we hardly knew ye.

And there's a 25lb. sack of basmati rice under the sink.

I have an exam in like two and a half hours

As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.

M. Cartmill

Under the Crushing Weight of Exams

Actually, I've only got three, and one is down so yay.

Now, the reason I only have three is because my prof decided, in lieu of a final exam, we would instead have one giant lab report worth 50% of our mark. That sounded like an awesome idea until about five days ago when I realized it was due this Tuesday (tomorrow), at which point I started having nightmares about agglutination inhibitiors, and realized that my notebooks were full of drawings of angry bacteria pulling sugars off of sad blood cells:

Actually not a bad representation of how cells bind

So basically, I've got this one GIANT lab report to due, which is due tomorrow at 2pm, and the last few days have been intense. I'm up to about seven pages on the report, and I expect another three or four by the time I'm done. But the best part is this: when I'm done, can I relax and have a pint, maybe go sit on the beach? No, no I can't, because my Reaction Kinetics test is on Friday and the sum total of my memories from that class is "acquire rate expression, keep adding natural logs and re-graphing until you get a straight line". (To be fair I think that's all anyone remembers from that class, though, including the professor)

The experiment itself is basically one extremely short lab needlessly expanded to include several hours that were completely unnecessary. The upshot is this: In the presence of certain proteins, red blood cells will bind together. If you get a testing plate and put red blood cells and the right protein in together and leave it for a few hours, you'll see a 'carpet' of red where the blood cells have all bound together. Basically, our task was to test different methods of inhibiting this binding; when that happens all you see is a red dot at the bottom of the well. All in all, that would have taken maaaaaaybe two hours to do (fifteen minutes to put everything in the plate, 1:45 at the pub while the reactions went), so our professor decided to add more needless busywork: we had to synthesize the inhibitors ourselves. Each one took minimum three hours to do. There were five. OH GOD.

so I sorta woke up at 4:30 am, then was unable to sleep again

Things I hate more than waking up early:

1.

Decoding Undergraduate Lab Reports

Are you a TA or unfortunate prof? Do you have to read 60+ lab reports a week? Does the prospect of reading through pages of intentionally dense non-prose to find out exactly where the data-fudging starts make your eyes bleed? In that case, you need my handy-dandy lab report translator!

"In theory, this will result in..." = "Actually, nothing happened, and you're going to have to read five pages of this crap to find out."

"We performed a literature search on the topic." = "I am a keener from the school of MOAR WORDS = MOAR BETTAR. Give me an A or I'll come to your office and cry about medical school."

"Warning: some of the reactants are corrosive to skin and mucous membranes..." = "...which is something I learned firsthand."

"The reaction proceeded vigorously." = "The beaker exploded, dude it was AWESOME, also I'm not allowed in the labs anymore."

"Upon reaction, the mixture had a strong smell." = "I got really, really high. It was insane. I tasted color."

"Further tests could not be conducted due to lack of materials." = "We used up all the deionized water squirting each other while waiting for refluxing."

"Further tests could not be run due to time constraints." = "I was hungover / hungry / bored and didn't want to do any more tests."

"The positive result could not be verified upon retesting." = "I probably fucked up and didn't wash my beakers or something, but I'm going to present it anyway."

"Although the results appear negative at first, statistical analysis reveals..." = "Check out how awesome I am at statistics. You won't even notice where I sneakily divided out half the error. Hee hee!"

"Slightly adjusting the graph can better show..." = "I changed the labels, scale, format, units, and quantity being measured. Also, I changed the best fit line from linear to a power series. Enjoy."

"The source of error is possibly attributable to random error..." = "It didn't work, and it's not my fault..."

"...or even poor experimental setup." = "...and in fact, it's probably YOUR fault."

"Unfortunately, the experiment did not bear out the hypothesis for an unknown reason." = "Read the procedure again, I probably forgot to add the catalyst."

"The experiment should be repeated in the future under different constraints." = "The experiment should be repeated in the future, but not by me."

Uhhh.

Guys. Guys. GUYS.

Star Trek is a gift from GOD HIMSELF, because it will allow us to keep the filthy brown people out of the land of the Chosen People.

If I were to go out and buy a goddamn 20-pound honey-glazed ham and actually carve an actual fist out of it, it would not be more ham-fisted than this guy's attempt to link a random pop-culture topic to KILL THE DIRTY MUSLIMS.

Ireland and Other Places of Note

So Zaheen was (actually still is until Monday) visiting, and we decided we should do something awesome, and what's more awesome than Ireland? (answer: Extreme Ghostbusters)
The whole trip actually cost us around £400 (total), which included staying at a really, REALLY nice hotel, which we later found out we were sharing with a wedding and a famous rugby player. Funnily enough, I didn't recognize him in the slightest despite almost running into him (in uniform no less), until we saw him on TV in tiny, tiny white shorts. (He looks way less like the missing link in person.)

Just a quick note, if you ever decide to fly anywhere, do NOT fly Ryanair-- it's probably the most nerve-wracking experience I've ever had watching the pilot try to land our plane in the middle of a rainstorm, and the descent starts while you're still over the Irish Sea. Then, when you've finally landed and you're just starting to relax from the pilot having apparently landed on one wheel and slowly graduated to two, the most horrible, tinny "burr burr BURR" trumpet noise blares LOUD over the cabin speakers and a pre-recorded Scottish(?!) voice announces that Ryanair has made another on-time landing!! The best record in Europe!!! Let me tell you, it takes a lot to make me wish for a delayed flight... the prospect of not having to hear that goddamn canned trumpet is enough.
Anyway, after resisting the urge to strangle the cabin crew we tottered down the cheap little stairs they'd set up and-- stopped. Ireland, even when seen from a tarmac, soggy with rain and fog, is gorgeous. Where we landed is more or less flat in all directions, with nothing to be seen but rolling green and some gentle hills in the distance. As Zaheen kept asking, why would anybody leave? It's so beautiful, even if there are no potatoes!
One of the first things I noticed getting off the plane was the signs-- all the official signs, as it turns out, are half in Gaelic. Gaelic is an interesting language, in the sense that every Gaelic word seems to exist according to a formula: take first three letters of normal word, add -iaeough to the end. As for the rest it appears to be 50% jumbled ramblings and 50% making it up as you go. (I believe a similar formula is applied in the case of the Cornish language.)
Getting out of the airport, there was conveniently a bus to the hotel driven by a cranky fat man who sweatted a lot and refused to speak in more than grunts. One of the main things we noticed while going through Dublin was that there are a LOT of beer ads. And beer trucks. And pubs. And people drinking beer. By 'a lot' I mean I actually saw a flatbed truck with what appeared to be about a hundred or so kegs of Carlsberg being unloaded into a pub. It was insane. Our first day, we took a bus into Dublin (much like a regular English bus, only dirtier, and with a ruder driver) and wandered around; after several hours, we were unable to find anywhere to eat other than a restaurant called "Captain America's". Being inside that restaurant was the most surreal experience I have ever had. Imagine an Applebee's staffed with Inuits who are completely, completely committed to the idea that they are running a small-town Americana restaurant to the point of having painted 'God Bless America' over the kitchen. Yeah. It was surreal. (Also they charged us something like 3 Euros for a Coke... goddamnit) We discovered later, to our irritation, that all of Dublin shuts down at around 8pm, so we just went back to the hotel to watch Gaelic TV and giggle at Colgate ads with Irish accents.
The next day, we decided to pay Trinity College Dublin a visit. TCD is great as a tourist attraction, but I can't help but feel it would be annoying to go to school there, mainly because of how good a tourist attraction it is-- I took a picture of the line waiting to see the Book of Kells; now imagine it being like that, every day, all the time, while you're trying to go to school there. I'd be annoyed. Next we wandered to St. Stephen's Green, where we sat on the grass for an hour or so, making fun of pidgeons; had lunch in a pub surrounded by old guys eager to watch 'the footy'; and wandered around central Dublin. Yes, I made irritating tourist purchases:

Hell yeah guys

After another night of entertaining Irish television (I believe Zaheen watched a documentary on the Sinn Fein entirely in Gaelic), it was time to pack up and head back to Blighty, and those goddamn canned Ryanair trumpets again.

Zaheen's trip highlight: St. Stephen's Green.
My trip highlight: Chinese cab driver with very, very strong Irish accent. "I hail from Hong Kong, meself!" indeed.

You can view my photos in all their blurry glory here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/27016357@N03/sets/72157617828854519/

England Prevails (lol i'm witty right Zaheen)

Well, I have been back in the UK for about a week now, and nothing has changed-- Fang & Co. have still been leaving strange messes in the kitchen, people's accents are still frequently inscrutable, England is still a nation of borderline alcoholics, and the University of Sussex is still utterly terrible at properly registering me for courses, having completely failed to register me for my required class on error analysis as of this writing. (I've decided that if I'm not registered by Monday afternoon, I'm just going to go to the lectures anyway and possibly call the registrar and make vague threats.)

Anyway, because I have precious little to do with myself these days aside from coursework, of which there isn't much yet (I had two hours this week), I've been poking around in the dark, seedy underbelly of the literary world. Prowling the backstreets of a city that keeps its secrets. Turning pages best left unturned to expose the dirt underneath. What I'm trying to say is that someone wrote a version of Pride and Prejudice, only with zombies:

Yes, it actually exists, and can be yours for £3.60.

Anyway, aside from mauling (lol) literary masterpieces, I'm also looking forward to having Zaheen come visit me! He's arriving at 7:25AM on the 29th of April, which happens to be the morning after Kat's birthday, which she has chosen a "Pimps, Hos, and Emos" theme for. Meaning my appearance at Gatwick at 7AM is going to be nothing short of utterly hilarious.

Sorry :/

I'll write more soon, promise.



[edit] p.s. I got an 80 on my thermo final!

I've been busy, ok?

Sorry for the lack of updates.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2009-04-06-web-site-domain-names_N.htm?csp=usat.me

Allow me to translate this article from corporatese: BAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

I just set my iPod to Dutch. Hypothesis: Everything looks funnier in
Dutch. Conclusion: Helemaal ja! God I'm bored.

Verstuurd vanaf mijn iPod

More from Examland

Sometimes I think my professors don't put a lot of faith in our abilities. I was going through the notes for my materials class when I found a slide that says "The Greeks used the same word, krustallos, to refer to both water and quartz". The next slide says "Water and quartz are not the same thing". There is also a diagram illustrating the difference.

...

also I refuse to tag this entry with "SCIENCE" because the ability to distinguish between a liquid that you drink and a hard mineral that you mine out of the ground isn't exactly Nature material

[edit] one quick thing. I was talking about textbooks with my materials/polymers professor and he told me Peter Atkins drives a Rolls. What the fuck?

Chemistry trivia

Here's some random junk I found out today. Doubtless they will be the only things I can think of when actually facing exams.

1. The average adult human contains 25g of magnesium.
2. Owing to its weak metallic bonds and light BCC structure, sodium does, in fact, float.
3. Beryllium compounds are some of the most toxic substances known to man.
4. Below a certain temperature white tin changes to grey tin. White tin was previously used as a solder on cans; it's thought that bringing these cans on some arctic expeditions is what led (among other things) to the expeditions' failure.
5. Cesium and water make a very entertaining combination.
6. HF, being a weak acid, doesn't hurt when you spill it on your skin. It does, however, continue through your body until it reaches bone, where it leaches calcium from your bones and blood until you die of cardiac arrest.
7. Wouldn't #6 make an awesome House episode? House could figure it out like two seconds before the patient dies and then he dramatically rushes in and starts rubbing elemental calcium on the patient's feet or something while Cameron goes "HOUSE WHAT ARE YOU DOING" and then the patient suddenly comes back to life and all is well and then he and Wilson trade quips as the end credits roll. Oh wait that's every single episode of House ever.
8. The phosphorous is on the side of the matchbox, not the match head. Unless you have strike anywhere matches, then it's on the match head.
9. White phosphorous is so energetically unfavorable, it's like the most retarded allotrope ever.

More as studying warrants.

Lab Photos

Continuing my trend of posting nothing but photos, I surreptitiously took some photos of the teaching labs today. They are cell phone photos so sorry for the quality, but you get the idea. :D

Some microscopes. You will notice that they don't have lights under the stage. We had to shine lights on the subject to get a picture. In this case it makes sense, though, because we were trying to buff cracks out of the surfaces of a few metals, and the microscopes were to check on our progress.

More microscopes and stuff. The blue putty in the syringe is diamond paste. Basically, the idea was to rub the metal sample (copper in my case, not pictured) first on the sandpaper in the upper left corner, then on the black velvet pad shown, to buff out any scratches on the surface. (Yes, it's very boring, yes, it makes your fingers ache.) After that, you etch with iron (III) chloride. In theory, this makes the grain boundaries appear very clearly under high magnification. (In practice, maybe if you're really lucky.)

This is an unrelated shot of some of the teaching labs' spectroscopy facilities at Sussex. The big grey box in the corner under the printer is one of the five frequently non-working IR machines. There's a UV-Vis spectrometer off to the right that you can't see.

At this point the head demonstrator was giving me the stink-eye so I had to put my phone away. Maybe next time I can sneakly get a picture of the TEM! (hahahahaha like they let the undergrads look at that)

Why

...is it that the more I sleep, the bigger the bags under my eyes get?

I just took a nap, honestly!

Oh, haha, very funny.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH ok maybe I do need a nap.

wtf, kitchen?

***WHEN I SAY "THE CHINESE" IN THIS ENTRY I AM REFERRING ONLY TO THE CHINESE PEOPLE WHO LIVE IN MY FLAT. I AM NOT EXPRESSING RESENTMENT OF ALL CHINESE PEOPLE. I AM SURE MOST CHINESE PEOPLE ARE LOVELY AND TIDY. THESE CHINESE PEOPLE, HOWEVER, ARE NOT, WHICH IS WHY THIS ENTRY IS ABOUT THE MESSES THEY, AND NOT ALL CHINESE PEOPLE, MAKE. THANK YOU.

The Chinese (who live in my flat) are horrible people who do horrible things to innocent kitchens. I feel this point should be reiterated. A lot. With photos. Enjoy. (Mom, you may want to skip this one. It will make your little dutch heart stop)

You can click on these to make them bigger, but really, why would you want to?

I know I posted this one before, but for the love of christ, IT'S A WHOLE LOBSTER JUST SITTING IN A PAN ON THE COUNTER WTF CHINESE PEOPLE (who live in my flat) WERE YOU RAISED IN A BARN (WITH LOBSTER)


This may look like an innocent-if-slightly-withered onion, but be assured, it is not. You see, previous to its being relocated to its current location (on top of the microwave), it spent a good WEEK marinating in leftover raw chicken juices. As in, they'd made some chicken, but left the packaging (complete with red-tinted chicken water) on the counter. For a week. With an onion in it.

Yummy.


This isn't really a disgusting kitchen thing so much as an illustration of the fact that Chinese Girl (name unknown, alias "Fang") buys catering-sized boxes of eggs, then leaves them on the counter for weeks. Weeks. Also, you can see the giant cleaver she uses to cut EVERYTHING with. It's very unsettling.


Now we arrive at the source of my original beef (lol) with Chinese Girl. Aside from the obvious twisted logistics involved in deciding to dump raw meat in a bowl and freeze it, uncovered, this used to be MY drawer. However, a few weeks after school started, Chinese Girl decided that a drawer being full of frozen pizza, ground coffee, and tortilla shells meant that it was obviously not being used and that she was free to dump her weird chunks of raw meat and and bizarre Chinese snack foods ("VEGETABLE FISH BALL" comes to mind) in it, eventually displacing my food to locales unknown. Seriously, I'm missing a pizza. I bet she ate it. I hate you, Chinese Girl.


This is what the stove looks like after a typical Chinese (who live in my flat) Cooking Party (tm). Especially sad since the cleaners actually just came the day before and the stove was spotless then. Note that one of the burners has been left on.


The corner next to the stove. We all have cabinets to put our things in, and everyone has one. Chinese Girl, however, apparently feels that she is also entitled to the space directly under the cabinet. And directly under my cabinet. And Charlotte's. And Tim's. And Jay's. And on top of the microwave. And on top of the fridge. And inside the fridge. And IN MY GODDAMN FREEZER DRAWER AKLAHSFDKSHG;FAG'FJBL'D


I'll end with this one. I think it speaks for itself. There have been times when the garbage pile has reached the underside of the counter.

Well, that's all for now! I hope you enjoyed this tour of the fine kitchen accomodations at Lewes Court! :D :D :D

Here are some things I have been thinking lately

I can't come up with anything coherent to say, so here's this instead.

1. I hate everyone who comes to class in pajamas. Not only does it say "I was too goddamn lazy to pick up a pair of jeans off the floor this morning", it also says "I did not shower today, and am completely unashamed of that fact." Mmm.
2. Someone in the block of flats across the footpath from me has been flicking his lights on and off with varying period and frequency for the last two hours. Either his lights are broken or he has the most demanding case of obsessive-compulsive disorder known to man and is merely flicking the lights exactly 500,000 times before bed
3. I am allergic to something in my room. It might be clean floors. Yeah, I have four lab reports due next week, so everything is spotless. My cleaning procrastination knows no bounds. I even vacuumed.
4. crunchie nuggets are the best snack food ever invented seriously
5. England comes up with really unfortunate names for things
it's mouthwash, guys, seriously



6. I can't remember what I was going to put here so have a picture of a lobster the Chinese left floating in some water in the kitchen for absolutely no reason
i'm thinking of starting a seperate blog with nothing but pictures of the weird shit the chinese leave in the kitchen



7. The school shop actually sells a dish called "pork faggots". Staff were not amused by me standing outside the freezer case, giggling for several minutes straight.
8. I think the lab coordinators are actually trying to kill us off. Monday: X-ray crystallography with machines so old, the only safety warning is a handwritten card reading "Do not remove lead glass shield as x-rays may be harmful" (Also there is a mailing address for Machu Picchu). Tuesday: Measuring vapor pressure... with beakers of elemental mercury.
   

This just in: My bi-monthly entry!

Well, here I am! Unfortunately, not too much to talk about. Hmm, what have I been up to lately? Ah, right:

• I HAVE THREE LABS IN TWO DAYS. EACH LAB IS FOUR HOURS LONG. OH GOD KILL ME NOW
• Relatedly: I hate my life.
• What the christ are bullet points
• lol

Also, I got a new phone. It is shiny (literally: it's an LG Shine). It's roughly over 9000 times better than my 8GBP Asda special.


I rearranged my room, so I have more floorspace to... uhh... do... something. Yoga? I don't know, my only contact with the floor is walking from my computer chair to the door. And that's not something I do often. Anyway, here's a picture of the rearranged room:


Now I am going to go finish the lab report pictured behind the two phones. See you next month, God willing!

Some thoughts

It's well-known among people with no lives that talking to plants helps them grow. Sadly, these people often think that the plants are responding emotionally to the sound of a voice, despite having absolutely no sensory organs capable of doing so. I remember reading that a study was done to determine which helps plants grow more, a friendly voice or an angry one. It was found that it doesn't matter, they both made the plant grow equally (probably because of the CO2 you exhale when you talk).

When you think about it, that means that there is someone, and possibly several someones, who studied and went to school for years, and spent thousands of dollars on education, and probably worked their ass off at it, to swear at a fern. That makes me insanely happy.

Also, DD, if you're reading this, sometimes when I'm sitting in the library at Sussex I SSH into chaos from my iPod and make small directory changes, just because I can.

Well, that was interesting.

So while I was on the plane flying back to the UK, I got up to go to the bathroom, which happened to be right next to the baby-changing station. I was standing in line when a very Hispanic-looking woman came out of the bathroom, handed me her baby and said "Please... hold for one minute... just one minute" and ran off. I don't know how or why babies always instantly know when they're not being held by their moms, but they do, and this one was no exception. And holy god she was loud. So I was standing there in line, desperately needing to pee, holding a squirming, wailing baby that I was obviously not related to at arm's length, while people stared. I wanted to yell "I did not steal this baby, her mother is just an idiot!"

Also, there were about five other people in line, including a father with a 5-year-old son and a woman who looked about 8 months pregnant. She looked over all these people and decided that the best candidate to take care of her infant was not actual parents, but a 21-year-old dressed in an unwashed hoodie and salt-stained jeans doing the peepee dance. Awesome parenting, lady!

When I landed, though, I discovered that British Rail was repairing or rebuilding or destroying or having tea with all the rail lines in southern England. I had to transfer five times. And on every single transfer, I was followed by a crowd of extremely loud curry-scented brown people who decided that trains in England = trains in India, which means you need to yell to be heard. And also trains are excellent places to have really deep, involved conversations in your native language. But only if your native language is really, really grating. Also, showering is either optional or conducted in a large tub of curry paste.

Since yesterday was my birthday, I celebrated with a lot of Strongbow. When I woke up the next morning, there was popcorn everywhere and my laptop was covered in nacho-flavored popcorn seasoning.

Oh, and also I had a lab today. One of the catalysts was Chromium [VI] oxide. I asked the demonstrator what I should to do get rid of it. He told me to pour it down the sink, but quench it with MeOH first. Turns out that pouring MeOH into Cr[VI]O3 makes it explode. Violently. And it takes the beaker with it.

Irony

Okay, granted I'm not quite back yet, but I felt this warranted an update.

So I was in Knoxville for most of the break. Now, anyone who's ever driven in Knoxville knows that the roads are basically a labyrinth of Greek proportions, and all the other drivers are the Minotaur. (As Pat likes to say, "Driving in Knoxville is a crime punishable by death.") It is also a given that the wealthy in America are incapable of living in normal neighborhoods like the rest of us. They must instead live in subdivisions less than 10 years old that have been carved out of previously unspoiled wilderness, surrounded by golf courses, and given names like Shady Oaks Glenne when the last oaks were cut down five years ago to make way for the aforementioned subdivision and the only shade is cast by bulldozers that are busy carving up the last remaining nice hillside to put in a new Target / Starbucks / Cold Stone Creamery (Target Creamerybucks?). And all the roads have names like "Sparkling Creek Lane" and "Ivy Cove Drive" and "Rich Protestant Ave."

I decided that I needed some new clothes and, because I hate shopping by myself, I invited Pat to come too. But she had to go see her (rich, Protestant) grandmother first. So, I dropped her off at her grandmother's, which was in a subdivision called Verdant Creek or Glowing Oaks or Shady River or No Black People or something like that, and went off to dick around in Borders for an hour. When it came time to pick her up again, you can probably imagine what happened. I got hellishly lost for a full hour, driving around the artifically winding roads of Farragut, being passed on all sides by a weird mix of Lexuses and pickups that were held together entirely by a mixture of rust and McCain/Palin stickers. I don't know when we decided, as a society, that what really makes a neighborhood look upscale is when the roads meander all over the place for no adequately explained reason other than to make the lives of intruders more difficult, but it probably coincides with what we will later recognize as the downfall of western society and what we now recognize as when useless wicker items got popular as a design scheme.

Anyway, so I was utterly lost in Farragut, and stopped at a red light in preparation for my 5th U-turn of the last 20 minutes, when I happened to look around and noticed, ironically, a building labelled "Attention Deficit Center of Knoxville". I was staring curiously at it, when I noticed that the light ahead of me had changed, and there was now a 50-foot gap between me and the nearest car (rusty McCain pickup). Quickly, I slammed on the accelerator and promptly stalled the car out. Because holding still on the road in Knoxville is a sin punishable by loss of your back bumper to a toothless guy named Junior (why is nobody ever named Senior?), I put the car in gear and quickly drove away. So quickly, in fact, that I managed to squeal the tires in the most assholish way possible. I happened to look back in mid-squeal, and noticed that the car behind me was inhabited by the tiniest old lady I had ever seen, who was wearing the most priceless affronted expression ever. She looked like I was stealing candy from her grandchildren.

I'll be back in the UK on the 10th (roughly), so I'll probably have more tales of exasperation then. Whoo!

Also, I got an iPod Touch for Christmas. I now know the meaning of true happiness.