The Penguins Made Me Do It...

The Penguins Made Me Do It...

:: 2006 7 February :: 1.50am
:: Music: The Cure - The Love Cats

bumbling list of fools
Opening night for the fortnight competition is going to be February the 14th - also known as Valentine's Day - in front of the judge's panel and everything. We'll be graded on opening night, but we'll have a second performance on the fifteenth. If you're lost, it's ok, this is just the one-act play I'm in.

Directly following that is the inter-college public speaking competition hosted by University of Wollongong. I'm the AUD representative in the impromptu speaking category. But I won't be able to spend the whole day there because the band is putting on their first show.

Antifrat. I'm just the manager, so I won't be on stage, but we've been working for a while on the set, the image, the schedules, booking the room for rehearsals, going through the regulations for the "amp requirements". I've gone through so much research on the past of this band, on the backgrounds of the members, on why anyone would hate on my friends.

My roommate is the guitarist. One of my best friends is the lead vocalist and guitarist. The drummer is my own drumming instructor and the bassist is my roommate's friend. I want all these people to turn everyone's heads. I want all the people that hated on the band the last time they performed to walk away pleasantly surprised. There's not much I can do offstage to improve their performance, but I won't settle for anything less. Call it irrational. Fine.

So much to do, it's absolutely intoxicating.

How's this for a set?
-Nirvana: Love Buzz
-Goldfinger: 99 Red Balloons
-Elvis Presley: Jailhouse Rock
-Jack Off Jill: I Touch Myself

Open to suggestions please ^-^

OK I go sleep now. Night night.

something to say?

moana

:: 2006 1 February :: 11.53pm

Why I want to fly.
My cousin was a good man. He was a loving husband and a doting father of two beautiful daughters. He used to bottle feed me when I was a baby, and would rub my nose until I fell asleep. There was a recurring joke that he shaped my nose for me, and that's why it's so smooth now.

When I was little enough, he would play the airplane game with me, planting his feet onto my hips and lifting me above him with my arms spread out. I was the plane, and he was the pilot. I loved that game so much, and we played it almost every time we saw one another until he went away for college.

He went to the UK to become a pilot for a few years, and when he came back, I had gotten too big to play the airplane game anymore. But now, he was a real pilot. He told me stories, how the studying was hard, how the vacations were scarce, how much pressure it is to fly hundreds of people and make them feel safe, keep them safe for their loved ones.

He's the reason I wanted to become a pilot, and we used to predict that he would be a captain by then, and me his co-pilot. We would fly together.

My cousin was a good man. He was a loving husband and a doting father of two beautiful daughters, aged three and four. He was kind and beautiful, full of laughter and jokes, easy to get along with and kind to everyone. We weren't close after his marriage, but I assume he held his daughters and rubbed their noses until they fell asleep, bottle feeding them like he used to when he was younger.

My cousin was a good man. He was just a very good man.

something to say?

moana

:: 2006 31 January :: 1.04pm
:: Music: The Cure - Killing An Arab

I'm alive... I'm dead...

My dinner was ruined a couple of nights ago when I was witness to an Iranian couple having a fight. The girl cried, the boy yelled. He would shove her, insult her, then she would spit on him, and he would sit on her and punch her several times. Then he would get up and insult her some more, and the cycle would go on.

I was told not to intefere by my roommate, Areej, who has witnessed this several times in various public places. And maybe I couldn't go up to them and tell them to stop, but I couldn't take my eyes off of them either. Same with the rest of us. The only person who was looking at their food and not at the fight was Areej, the girl who had seen it all before.

The guys, getting reasonably upset, got up and told the security guard to stick around. The security guard responded by taking a walk and doing absolutely nothing. And in the time they were gone, the whole time I was looking at her, she finally looked back.

When he smacked her in the face, she turned around, looked right at me, and yelled across the food court, "What the fuck you looking at?! Bitch!"

I was stunned. If someone is beating up someone else in public, you know what? People will stare. Areej tellsme stories about how long this has been going on, about how it's some kind of twisted relationship between them, how they both like it this way. Don't think I stopped looking when she yelled at me, though. We were the only people in the entire food court. She would constantly sneer at anyone who so much as passed by them on the way out. Several times she would yell over her shoulder that "those fuckers are looking."

And I had a come back, afterwards, when the initial shock was over. "You're making a spectacle and ruining my dinner. Take your issues in private, please."

And to think, I never thought I'd be the kind of person to sit by and not do anything.

1 mabidee | something to say?

cowboy67

:: 2006 28 January :: 1.38pm

one of the best movie trailers i've seen in a long, long time

something to say?

moana

:: 2006 27 January :: 8.41pm

I got two wisdom teeth removed yesterday, and though I'm fine now, I still find that my frighteningly low tolerance to pharmeceuticals is giving me too much of a kick out of pain killers. My friends agree.

In other news, I've started drumming. It's good to bang on something hard enough for the foundation in the ceilings to shake. Granted, the room is in bad shape, but still, it's quite the rush. And no, I'm not good at it, but I am getting tips from the most patient soul in the world.

My brother comes in tonight. He's here with his friends so I won't be seeing much of him, but it's all just exciting for me. I hope (in vain) he'll come by campus, so I can show him aorund and finally feel like I've done something exceptional with it all, the time and money spent here.

Pathetic. I need my brother's approval to feel adequate. Ah well. You have issues, too.

Now I really must work on my CIS assignment. Cheer up, woohulites, It's getting depressing reading your journals. ^-^

something to say?

moana

:: 2006 23 January :: 11.07am
:: Music: Emma Shapplin - Miserere, Venere

Every morning, we wake up, we dress up, we go out, we come back. Every afternoon, we eat up, we drink up, we change clothes, we go out. Every evening, we get made up, we get drugged up, we pass out, we go home.

On the other hand...

There are some who, every morning, wake up, wash up, pray, and go to classes. Every afternoon, these people eat up, drink up, hurry up, they have classes in a few minutes. And every evening, they come home, they wash up, they study hard and they pray again. Again and again and again before bed, because they're so scared, and they're so sad, that we never seem to go anywhere at all.

something to say?

moana

:: 2006 20 January :: 11.48pm
:: Music: The Shins - We Will Become Sillhouettes

I'm screaming at the top of my lungs pretending the echoes belone to someone I used to know.

Paintball is amazing, and if you haven't been shot at by a ball of paint travelling at 300 feet per second, then you haven't lived.

something to say?

cowboy67

:: 2006 18 January :: 11.31pm

i hate when people highlight in books because most people don't know what's important and what's not and have no discrimination between main points and superfluous details, and so they highlight whole paragraphs at a time, and then sell their books back, so that when i buy their books, i can't concentrate on anything i'm reading except that PEOPLE DON'T UNDERSTAND THE CONCEPT OF HIGHLIGHTING.

5 mabidees | something to say?

moana

:: 2006 18 January :: 12.20am
:: Music: Muse - Space Dementia

the internet in the dorms has been acting up (again) and it's being iffy about letting me into woohu. i can update (sometimes) and i can check my friends page (sometimes) but i can't read any comments! it's SO frustrating.

in other news, i found a very interesting announcement on the Troupe's bulletin.

Welcome back! Wish you a very Happy New Year and Eid
Mubarak. The Troupe is back and promises to be highly
active this term. The first of the many events for the
Troupe is an inter-college public speaking
competition. The Troupe plans on sending 12
participants for the competition, which is organized
by University of Wollongong and will be held on
February 16th at Knowledge Village. The categories for
the competition are as follows:

- Original Oratory
- Extemporaneous Speaking
- Impromptu Speaking
- Radio Address
- Storytelling (Traditional)
- Storytelling (Original)

impropmtu. i have to try it again. must. i just have to squeeze it in between classes, acting, directing and writing for the zine. no problem.

something to say?

moana

:: 2006 16 January :: 12.21am

My country lost a leader this morning. I never thought it'd make me so sad but it does. I'm so sad for my country's loss, for my family's loss and, most of all, for my own.

Allah yer7ima.

something to say?

moana

:: 2006 12 January :: 11.45pm

Dear Hero,
Today was the debut of my disenchantment with reality. Today, Hero, I fell in love with your life and I forgot my own, so that it seemed almost irrelevant. The drama just seemed to dissipate. The confetti stories and the shredded remains and the 'what's what' of what's real and what's not just fluttered away. It was the most awesome thing; you lead my mind into calm insanity. I couldn't take my eyes off of you. I couldn't blink, I couldn't breathe, I couldn't even think. Hero, today I felt more in touch with God than I've felt in years. Hero, today I fell in love with you.

2 mabidees | something to say?

cowboy67

:: 2006 9 January :: 7.50pm

it's always funny until it happens to you
i hate helen keller jokes. i don't even know how to express the anger that rages inside me whenever i hear some insensitive, unappreciateive, ignorant dumbfuck say something stupid about her, and then let out belligerent laughter at his/her own self-perceived genius.

do you know anything about anything except what MTV spoon-feeds you from the moment you wake up until the moment you get drunk off your ass, screw a random person, and puke all over a public bathroom?

since you allow everyone else to do all the thinking for you, i think i'll jump at the opportunity to make you look even more like the asshole that you are.

this woman that you like to sneer at, this human being (that's right folks, the same exact thing as you are, imagine that!) that you de-humanize with your degrading insults, has more guts, more brains, and more compassion than your sorry piece-of-shit ass ever will. do you have any concept of what it might be like to be handicapped? could it be possible for you to think for 5 seconds about how difficult, frustrating, and sad it would be to live in this world, in this american society especially, with a handicap? she could not hear or see! do you even understand what that means in terms of existence? can you fathom how amazing it is that she was able to learn things, to communicate, and to become an educated, intelligent person when she couldn't see or hear a language? have you any idea of how important language is for simply THINKING, let alone expressing thoughts and understanding those of others? do you even care that you were so fortunate as to be born with eyes and ears, and not only that, but with ones that function properly? you ungrateful idiots. helen keller is fucking amazing. she is someone you should kneel to and admire! you will never be 1/100,000,000,000 of the person she was.

as both a feminist and socialist (two of the hottest things ever, in my opinion), she wrote to a british suffragist in 1911, saying:

Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between tweedledum and tweedledee...

You ask for votes for women. What good can votes do when ten-elevenths of the land of Great Britain belongs to 200,000 and only one-eleventh to the rest of the 40,000,000? Have your men with their millions of votes freed themselves from this injustice?

once her political position became public, the brooklyn eagle newspaper stated that "her mistakes spring out of the manifest limitations of her development." she responded by writing an editorial in the new york call (because the brooklyn eagle would not publish it in theirs):

Oh, ridiculous Brooklyn Eagle! What an ungallant bird it is! Socially blind and deaf, it defends an intolerable system, a system that is the cause of much of the physical blindness and deafness which we are trying to prevent... The Eagle and I are at war. I hate the system which it represents... When it fights back, let it fight fair... It is not fair fighting or good argument to remind me and others that I cannot see or hear. I can read. I can read all the socialist books I have time for in English, German and French. If the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle should read some of them, he might be a wiser man, and make a better newspaper. If I ever contribute to the Socialist movement the book that I sometimes dream of, I know what I shall name it: Industrial Blindess and Social Deafness.

obviously, keller has much more integrity when responding to idiots than i do, and that is why i have so much respect for her. helen keller gets my vote for miss america.

2 mabidees | something to say?

moana

:: 2006 9 January :: 2.37am
:: Music: The Pillows - Crazy Sunshine

I'm leaving on Friday the thirteenth. I hope it's not bad mojo, but I'm just anxious to get back home.

something to say?

cowboy67

:: 2006 5 January :: 3.33am

i'm home!