like a cholo

i'm supposed to be conducting a database search to find call numbers for several articles for a TA i had last quarter, but i'm almost done, and super frustrated with the system, so i'm taking a break. also, i'm at home, and taking advantage of the fact that i'm allowed to be lazy at home. i'm allowed.

it's about ten million degrees in this house right now, so that's fun.

this past weekend was absolute craziness. andy and i moved out of the apartment all day saturday, and even though it took a long time and was hellish and i'm still sore in places i didn't even know i had muscles (i.e. the inside of my forearms), it was much, much better than i had anticipated. we're moving up two floors in the same building, into an apartment that isn't yet vacant, so we had to move out on saturday and find a place to store all of our crap until next weekend. initially, we braced ourselves for several trips back and forth between westwood and my house, with lots of loading and unloading, with the promise of having to do it all again next week. however, our manager was super amazing, and is letting us use her private storage unit in the garage, which is so incredibly fabulous, it's hard to articulate. after moving everything down to storage, still a huge task in and of itself, i realized how totally horrendous it would have been to have to move everything out of the building and back. terrible. andy and i not only had our beds and desks and room junk, but also all the living room furniture and kitchen stuff - it was a mighty job. i'm not really looking forward to doing it all over again. a good thing about moving though is redecorating, or, in my case, decorating in the first place. i'm going to try to make the place more home-y. i think that last year i was just so giddy that it wasn't a dorm room and had an actual kitchen that i didn't really care about personalizing it. now, i don't particularly want to live in a showroom.

after moving out, i drove home really briefly to unload some things we'd packed into the van before we realized we could use the storage unit, and then showered quickly, managing to bitch at my brother and my mom in the short ten minutes that i interacted with them. i then drove down to irvine with shiza for quach's twenty-first birthday, where shiz and i were the dd's for the guys, who, by the time we got down there, had already been playing beer pong for an hour and a half. it was good to see everyone in one place, but there were some glaring omissions, the biggest being zoe, who doesn't home from peru for five more days, and who will be forced to see a lot of me once she's back.

i got pissed off on the way home from LA this morning because i was listening to the radio, and that "lean like a cholo" song came on. it pissed me off for two reasons: 1) i can't seem to write a damn thing these days, and somehow, someone managed to write and release a song about how to lean like a cholo; and 2) every time i hear this song i am reminded of how my drunken, jewish uncle danced to it at the bar mitzvah, and that, my dears, is frightening.

i just reread this entry and it's a terrible summary and was probably hugely boring, and i apologize. my brain is melting out my ears (it's very hot here). if you want to know more about melting brains, please consult "stiff," a book about cadavers by mary roach, which is actually way fascinating. after that, you should read "spook," another mary roach book about ghosts. that way, you can blame all future morbid thoughts on me.

p.s. i would like to dedicate this next little gem to leah, who should know by now that i wholeheartedly support her complete and total denial of the fact that she's expected to shut up and march in line. i say never be ashamed of your innate ability to challenge people and their beliefs and their fears. embrace it, because they will probably encounter very little resistance to their opinions (especially where you are), and i don't think that there is anything more vital to a person's life than their acceptance of the diversity of the world. upon review, that sounds like a voice-over from an oprah special (which i did, in fact, just watch, so please forgive), but i felt i needed to get that out. do not ever shut your face, leah. you have beautiful teeth.