okay, this is a legitimate recommendation

Everyone needs this album. And you should buy it, because it's a charity album for AIDS/HIV relief. And you should buy it from amazon, because... I referred you. And you can get DRM-free downloads, which is cool. iTunes is sort of shifty with that.

Seriously.

Ben Gibbard and Feist?

Bon Iver?

The National?

Yeasayer?

Arcade Fire?

All in one place?

This is good advice that you should follow.

Love always,

Clara

poetry, antisocial tendencies, and tflan

I am going to remind you now to read Thomas's blog, mostly because this post was mostly inspired by him.

He was talking about autumn, and a poem he wrote once. I used to write shitty poetry as a child as well. I think we all did.

But what this all most reminded me of was a poem that I didn't write. No, this is the artistic masterpiece of Katie, age... 6? I don't know. I'd like to say 9 or something, but she was definitely among the more literate in our fourth grade class, and the spelling here indicates otherwise.

Katie, I'm sorry, but I have to share this.

tristen is a trixter
i know its true
he some times
evean cears me up
when i'm bluue,
i'm sure of the
trixter part,
but i still
like him in my hart
"NO" said the teachers
but he still
ran on the bleachers,
Hes verry tuff,
and sometimes ruff
oh i love tristen

We were both somewhat in love with Tristan at various times in our elementary school years.

I like that it was his 1st grade badassery that attracted Katie. I remember having a huge crush on Patrick A. that year because this one day we were doing some kind of activity that involved flipping coins, and we were partners, and instead of actually following directions he showed me magic tricks for the whole 15 minutes.

What. A. Rebel.

I wish I had more of my younger-years shitty poetry. I know there was a lot of it on my old old laptop (that I had in 7th and 8th grade).

I was a little bit emo. Always lovesick. Generally unsatisfied most of the time.

Mary Evelyn: I'm going sailing today!

John: Cool! What kind of sailing?

Mary Evelyn: I think it's one of those boats where you have to strap yourself in. They're going to put me with more experienced people.

Me: Sailing is nice. I like sailing on small boats... by myself. I just like being by myself on a boat in the water. Actually, I just like being alone.

Benny: Whoa, how did this get from sailing to antisocial behavior? Like, "Yeah sailing is fun... I hate people."

Me: I don't know. It seemed like a pretty natural transition.

I may be turning into one of those people who can turn any inane thing (such as, perhaps, mooing at cows?) into a reflection of my inner turmoil.

Not sure how I ended up like that.

Probably too much dentistry in my life.

I went to the dentist again yesterday. Just for a cleaning this time. But still. I hate the dentist. I had this whole rant to Genevieve last night about how much I hate dentists.

Anyway, Thomas's blog is really picking up and I really want him to stick with it, because I laughed out loud several times just now, catching up.

Love always,

Clara

things one needs in college

I have an exciting announcement, and that announcement is that I want you to buy things!

I've signed up for Amazon Associates, so I'm going to be posting links to thing on amazon every once in a while, and if you end up buying those things or using those links or something, I getmoney.

Honestly, I'm only going to link to things that I actually think you should buy, because obviously if I linked to things that sucked, no one would buy them, and then everyone losesbecause I waste your time and I don't even get paid to waste your time. I'm not sadistic. Not really.

Anyway, I kind of want to experiment with this. Without further ado, a list of things I have decided one needs in college in new england, and links to buy these things if they strike your fancy.

The links are the pictures. Snazzy!

1. Rain Boots.

It rains here all the damn time. The thing about college though is that at home, when it rained, I had to try to stay dry on the 30 second walk from school to the tram stop. Here, classes can be legitimately across campus from one another, and there's a lot of rain-walking going on.

Um also let's try to get "rain-walking" to catch on. I'm thinking it could be a cool dance move.

2. Headphones

Mine are broken and it's killing me. Earbuds will not do the trick in college. I might end up buying these. They're selling at Urban Outfitters for like, sixty bucks, but you can get them online for basically half that, which gets me excited.

3. Coffee machine

You need one that doubles as a tea kettle, because sometimes when you steal someone else's tea kettle, they want it back. Ridiculous, I know. Anyway, coffee in the Ratty is terrible and I'd rather have my own in my room, and be able to make tea and soup and whatnot at my leisure.

And, on that note...

4. Starbucks VIA Instant Coffee. One of the flavored ones.

I'm actually somewhat obsessed with this. The unflavored ones taste like instant coffee (which is not the best thing to taste like), but the caramel flavored one tastes delicious. Apparently if you make it with steamed milk it's even better, but who the hell steams milk?

Also...

5. Swiss Miss Hot Cocoa Mix

Because who doesn't want hot cocoa when it's cold? (And of course I'm partial to the Swiss)

6. A cool book about linguistics

How else will people know how independently driven and curious you are? Read in public places.

Also, I just really like Steven Pinker, and if you're a fan of linguistics you should definitely read this. It's very cool.

7. A drinking camera

i.e. A camera that you won't worry about. I love Turtle the DSLR dearly, and I don't want anything to happen to him. Which is why I bought Lucy, refurbished, for $75. I can take her to frats without being too concerned about the repercussions. She's sturdy.

8. Wall decor

This poster is on my wall right now. It's great. Boring walls suck. I can't really give you any better reasons to buy a poster than that.

This is my new experiment, guys. Basically all I'm asking is that if you know you need to buy something off of amazon, you get there from here. Or not. It really doesn't matter.

Love always,

Clara

um, hi.

Let me tell you some facts about myself.

• I have brought no less than eight pairs of sunglasses to college.
• I have no idea what the fuck we talk about in Modern Culture and Media
• Somehow it looks like everyone has more work than me.
• I can't listen to songs on repeat. It ruins it. (Which is why I'm so OCD about my mix CDs)
• I'm actually OCD about a lot of things including: my rug being flat, my statistics on last.fm, where I sit in economics (mostly because it's caused problems in the past), and my ongoing scrabble games with my parents.
• Yeah, I play scrabble with my parents. I'm beating my dad at the moment.
• I get underestimated a lot.
• I have more scarves in my possession than some people have pants.
• I'm still figuring out the social-interaction thing.
• I'm afraid I'm often nostalgic for things that never existed.
• I'm allergic to nickel. This interferes with my love of cheap jewelry, or my unwillingness to spend more than $15 on a watch.
• Actually, I'm usually unwilling to spend more than $15 on anything at all, but somehow money still seems to fly away as soon as I get my hands on it.
• I name inanimate objects.
• I'm very protective of my music tastes. Some things are sacred, right?
• I wish I had more "awesome thrift store finds." So far, I have an oversized Ralph Lauren sweater, and an oversized polo shirt. I also had a very long pearl necklace that I got at a flea market in Neuchatel. For whatever reason, the only things that appeal to me in thrift stores are larger-than-usual prep staples.
• I miss the days when Death Cab for Cutie seemed to know everything about me.
• I make weird faces in pictures, because I'm fairly certain I'm going to end up looking weird anyway, and I'd rather it be on purpose.

I felt like I hadn't blogged anything substantial today.

This feels substantial now.

Good.

Love always,

Clara

loving the blog.

Follow my blog with bloglovin

I'm trying to get a bigger audience. Ergo, I'm shamelessly self-promoting.

Um...

Tell your friends?

Love always,

Clara

thomas is a blogger!

So, if this isn't your first time here, I'm sure you've read about Thomas by now. He basically cracks me up on a daily basis.

And now, he has a blog! So he can continue to crack me up, even while I'm over here in america!

Obviously the only reason he created this blog was for my entertainment, but you can read him too!

I am so excited.

Also, I've got a shoutout in the first post, which is brilliant. Go read that first, so that you can read about me, and because that makes the most sense chronologically.

I Can Talk

Love always,

Clara

i took this photo!

And edited it thusly!

And I really like it!

I've been playing with my free trial of Lightroom lately. It's pretty fantastic.

Love always,

Clara

fetishes...

This is another one of those blog posts that gets out of control because I haven't really done much in the past few days, and thus have very little source material.

I sure love three day weekends.

While I was doing all of this not-much this weekend, I happened to do my MCM reading (which isn't due until wednesday! I'm such an overachiever, guys!). It was wild.

I was reading a deep analysis of a shitty Nicholas Cage movie,* when I came across this passage:

... the camera suddenly embarks on what could only be called a wet dream of surveillant omniscience, craning up and over the walls of the hallway in an "impossible" shot that tracks across one room after another as if the ceiling had been lifted off, peering down into each until finally it locates the object of narrative desire.

So I'm pretty sure that this shot could indeed be called something else. A "fantastic illustration" of surveillant omniscience? A "prime example"?

Although, when you look at the rest of the language, I think this author just wanted to slip "wet dream" into his scholarly masterpiece.

*Okay, I haven't actually seen the film in question, but I really don't like Nicholas Cage. On that note, this author was obsessed with him. The article discussed five or six films, but the author only managed to name that one actor, who happened to be in two of them.

Seeing as everything is fetishistic in cinema anyways, I can't even make a Nicholas-Cage-fetish-joke. It wouldn't even work.

Me: Hah! You have a Nicholas Cage fetish, obviously!

Author: Are you referring to my inherent fetishistic scopophilia? Yes.

Me: ...

Love always,

Clara

chill day

I can't decide whether today was delightfully relaxing or eerily antisocial.

I woke up around ten and decided it would be a good day for a walk, and that I should also do some work, and the intersection of these two things would be to walk to the bookstore in Providence to look for a book I needed for philosophy, which the Brown bookstore had sold out of (thanks, brown.)

So I did that, and I brought my reading for my modern culture and media class, which I was planning on reading in Starbucks, or perhaps the bookstore coffee shop.

That was fun.

Around 2 I got hungry, so I bought some sushi. That was cool.

Seriously, that was my day. The coolest part was buying sushi. That should be sad, except I really was quite pleased with the sushi.

Then I downloaded a bunch of songs.

Big Red Machine - Aaron Dessner & Justin Vernon

Train Song - Ben Gibbard & Feist

Light Up - Tegan and Sara

Sailing - Deerhunter

Easy Lovers, Hardly Friends - Jeremy Messersmith

Virginia - Jeremy Messersmith

Miracles - Jeremy Messersmith

The Great Escape - Patrick Watson

Love always,

Clara

bitches of shit

I had the funniest night last night.

First, at like, 7:30, basically right after dinner, there was an impromptu dance party in Poland 308 (also known as my room) (also, [insert snappy nickname here]).

We played this song at least twice.

We also played "Fuck You", and wondered what on earth the radio edit could possibly sound like. Happily, we're smart kids who know how to google, so that question was answered basically as soon as it was asked.

They call it, "Forget You."

What?

So then we started reading youtube comments, because there are few things funnier than youtube comments.

Commenter (in spanish): Bitches of shit! This is bad!

Or something like that.

Is "bitches of shit" a normal spanish expletive? Because I think it's my new favorite.

Anyway, then I headed over to Jameson and the boys tried to throw popcorn into my dress. I always thought they would grow out of that by senior year. No luck.

That's okay. I kind of liked high school boys anyway. Glad they haven't grown up completely.

Love always,

Clara

photographs

faunce, originally uploaded by csb324.

I took this picture!
I also blogged possibly 300 times today.
That's cool.

Whatever. Haters gonna hate, hatters gonna hat.

Love always,
Clara

ophelia

There are so many things to blog today. People around me keep being either hilarious or wonderful or both. Maybe it's the coffee talking.

Thomas

ew. English has killed me.
I'm off to die in my sleep.
Tell MT I'm sorry.
And Hamlet is my hero.
Me
when i first read hamlet, it was a few months before i moved to switzerland. the degree to which i identified with ophelia's losing-her-mind-ness was actually alarming.
if ONLY anyone in that play could just die in their sleep... much less drama.
Thomas
That's true.
But then, what would it be without the drama?
A castle full of dead Scandinavians?
Probably.
ANd I like Scandinavia.
A lot.
So much, I want to study their language.
but Not Danish, obviously. Polonius is a sket. But for some reason reminds me of a certain principal. take a guess.
Anyway. I can see how you and Ophelia relate.

File this under: Thomas is my absolute hero. He should start a blog. He already twitters. He's halfway there, if he plans to have 280 character blog posts.

Do you remember when I was having my Ophelia moment? I seriously lost my mind and played in the flowers and such. There were some serious and relevant parallels.

Love always,

Clara

my secret starbucks

I have discovered the most wonderful place in the world, and I'm not going to give you directions.

It's mine, and I think what I like about it is that it's not overrun with college kids.

I'll say that it's a starbucks, and it's off college hill, and I have to take a bus to get here, but a short bus ride, and it's worth it. I came here once before after my unsurprisingly hellish dentist appointment earlier, and the guy behind the counter showed me their new Clover coffee machine and we had a nice chat about coffee connoisseurship.

I figured I'd come back today and get some work done.

So I hop on my bus to this undisclosed location, and get in line, and then I decide I'm in a fall latte mood. It's pleasantly windy out. So I ask whether the toffee mocha latte is good, and the woman behind the counter advises me that it's a little too sweet for her tastes, but if I don't like it they'll make me something else.

Then I see new flavors of VIA (starbucks insta-coffee) on the table, and feel the need to investigate, and they offer me a sample! The woman explains that it was made with steamed milk, so I ask how to steam milk, because I honestly don't know. And she says, "Well, you can microwave it, or heat it over the stove."

They assumed I had a stove at my disposal!

What a wonderful feeling. To top it all off, the guy accidentally made me a grande latte instead of a tall, and apologized.

This is great. This is the kind of place that has regulars. Real live Providence people. I love it.

Love always,

Clara

liveblogging linguistics

We're talking about prefixes changing the syntactical identity of a word. Apparently it's unusual. Suffixes do it a lot.

Prof: Question in the back?

Benny: I thought of one. Game... and pregame.

It's true. One is a noun, one is a verb.

Isn't college fun?

Love always,

Clara

oh, life.

We're talking about South Korean cultural domination in eastern asia. And eye-opening surgeries. And how this isn't Westernization exactly.

(This is in Modern Culture and Media. Obviously)

Prof: So this eye surgery is a way of becoming more South Korean, the same way getting a boob job could be considered a way to become... more Californian... I love California. I had the best time there this summer, although I clearly didn't participate.

She is adorable.

In other news, my life is a JOKE. Literally one day after I had that nervous breakdown about my headphones breaking and being temporarily stuck with my crappy earbuds, my crappy earbuds are horribly mutilated by the elliptical and my carelessness.

THIS IS A PROBLEM.

I was really upset, but then I worked out with what was left of my earbuds, and the endorphins have me placated a little bit.

Still. Things seem to be conspiring against me.

Robert is taking the PSATs soon.

Robert

hehe, well my goal ideally would be to lay open some hideous truth, bankrupt collegeboard, and walk away with perfect marks and a MIT scoloarship
but thats not likely to happen
Me

THAT WOULD BE AWESOME
I hate the college board
i used to write them nasty letters
Robert
hehe
well i don't have anything against them
Clara
not yet you don't
Robert
its just my natural instinct to destroy large cooperations, and my general hatred for the world
well not really
i am rambling
i am relatively happy currently

That makes one of us.

That's a lie. I'm relatively happy as well, but I really do think that's just the endorphins.

Robert
as males do, i assumes the best possible option as a god given truth and so went about my life, thinkign of haggis, pussy and tea

... And, of course, Robert's excellent storytelling skills.

Love always,

Clara

songs to distract me from scarring korean films

So today for Modern Culture and Media, we watched a highly relevant and critically acclaimed Korean film called "Oldboy". Basically, people lose limbs and tongues and teeth and incest is everywhere, and I don't recommend it.

So instead of talking about that any further, I decided it would be worthwhile to wander around youtube and post songs I like, and some intermittent real conversations.

John: They were so cute. I basically stalked them.

Genevieve: I stalked a couple in high school too. It was an interracial couple.

John: Were you friends with them?

Genevieve: No.

Alex: Does it rain when it snows?

Genevieve: It doesn't rain. It snows.

Alex: OH! The rain IS the snow!

In the process of writing this blog post, my headphones broke. This is not okay!

I am so angry. I've only had these headphones for like, a year, and they were fairly expensive, and I loved them so much because they were blue and I felt so cool when I wore them, and now they only play sound in one ear, which gives me basically the biggest headache in the world. Thanks a lot, Urban Outfitters. Now I'm using crappy earbuds which fall apart all the time.

Before I was in college, I'd complain for a bit and I'd buy some new ones but now I have to think about my purchases. So I'm tempted to just stay with my crappy earbuds or buy other crappy headphones, but those will just break just as quickly. And I'll be angry again, and they won't even be as good to begin with. And there's no solution, because I wouldn't be able to afford legitimately nice ones. And mine looked cool, and let's be real for a moment- the hardcore audiophile quality headphones all look ridiculous, and not in the way that I tend to strive for. Fuck this. I need happy music even more now.

No luck. The bad mood persists.

Love always,

Clara

michelle needs genevieve

My roommate Genevieve just got a new phone, and it displays emails in essentially the same way it displays texts.

Witness this:

Obviously Michelle needs Genevieve's help with something. I had no idea they had such a personal relationship. Rock on.

Love always,

Clara

tricky undercover seasonally affected republicans

Thomas, on my economics woes:

Maybe it's run by Republicans.
Bad Republicans
Undercover.

That would be interesting.

I had a linguistics partay up in this hizzle tonight.

Me: Oh my god, post-classical greek!

John: Does that excite you?

Me: It warms my heart!

Me

Hey double checking - did you get three rules for #2?

Benny

Nope. 3.

Me

Three = 3 ?

John: Where's your sun lamp?

Me: Over here.

John: I might be seasonally affected.

Me: You're not going to be seasonally affected on october fourth.

John: It's getting worse as the days go on though!

Me: Oh, so the stem is more reliably found in the genitive and accusative. That makes sense. The nominative is tricky.

Benny: Yeah, the nominative is a tricky little bitch.

Obviously we're all really cool.

Love always,

Clara

peter pan owes me sixteen dollars

I saw The xx last night!

Naturally, because John and I are dysfunctional and Peter Pan is a douche and most strangers are friendly, it took us about three hours to get there (and we still didn't miss Intro!).

Allow me to explain/vent.

So John and I were supposed to take a 5:45 Peter Pan bus from Providence to Boston. It was supposed to get us to boston with plenty of time. I'll acknowledge that I did fall asleep in my room shortly before we were supposed to leave to get to the major providence bus stop, but we hauled ass and got to Kennedy Plaza at probably 5:42.

Which should have been great, but it turns out this bus leaves from Kennedy Plaza at 5:30, and leaves a different Providence area bus stop at 5:45. Peter Pan just decided that it would be better not to list the names of the stops on their tickets, and leave us to assume (with our impeccable utilization of Occam's Razor) that "Providence" means "That huge obvious bus terminal in central Providence". Which, of course, was incorrect.

John decided it would be a good idea to try to run to this other bus stop. That didn't work so well. We didn't even know where the other one was.

At this point we realized we had two options. Take a train, or take a taxi. I looked it up on my phone - train tickets seemed cheaper, and there was a train from Providence to Boston at 6:30, which would get us there around 7:30, when the show officially started. We wandered over to the train station and bought our tickets, annoyed by the situation in general, and sat down.

Oh, this whole time, I was carrying my dinner in a Ratty take out box. This is the point when I finally got to eat my goddamned grilled cheese.

So. It turns out our train is delayed by 25 minutes. At this point we'd googled it and established that The xx had two openers, so we were only a little worried. We saw people getting up and someone saying "this is the train to Boston," so we figured we were in business.

Not so much. Somehow we didn't realize that this was the commuter train? Although it essentially could not have been more obvious if it said "commuter" on the side? And didn't look like an amtrak train at all?

Luckily, we somehow got into a conversation with the guy sitting across from us, who filled us in to this glaringly obvious fact. At that point we saw our real train, for which we had tickets, pull into the station.

Me: Do you think that's it?

Guy: You want to make a run for it? I think you could make it.

Us: Let's go

I was literally pushing John into people trying to get off this train in an appropriately timely manner.

We sprinted.

And we made it! Finally! After that our transportation woes had basically ended, although the metro ticket machine in Boston gave John fifteen dollars worth in gold coins, which he seemed to think was a problem.

I like those.

Anyway, the concert was amazing, and taking the Peter Pan bus back was fairly uneventful.

Although it didn't fly.

Love always,

Clara

oh what a weekend

Sorry I've been absent. I've also been busy.

Yesterday Alex and I went to the mall. It was fantastic. The mall-people put makeup on us, which I loved. Apparently Alex's person was overzealous with the foundation, which didn't fly, but regardless the experience as a whole was a positive one.

We really shouldn't go shopping together. It's dangerous.

Now I'm in the ratty doing homework, trying to have everything finished by five.

Clearly that's going really well, seeing as I'm blogging.

Not my fault. N. Gregory Mankiw, former economic advisor to George W. Bush, author of my econ textbook, is evil and cruel and wants me to go through pages and pages of government reports to answer his (frankly, quite useless) questions about tax policy. If he wants me to analyze some data, he'd better provide me with the fucking data, not send me on a ridiculous wild goose chase.

I'd really rather not do that.

Also, what the hell is an economic advisor to dubya doing writing my econ textbook? I wouldn't say that the economics of 2000-2008 were the most successful. Quite the opposite, actually. Are they trying to teach me how to run the economy into the ground?

Luckily, my professor is quick to point out any glaringly obvious conservative-propaganda-based blanket statements.

So I'm annoyed about econ right now. That's about it.

Love always,

Clara