Hatching Pete: A Disney Channel original movie. It had its amusing moments, but it was definitely no "High School Musical." I only sat and watched it all the way through because I really, really didn't want to study.

A League of Their Own: A classic. Seriously, the movie is seventeen years old. I felt really old when I figured that out.

17 Again: I expected this to be a "so cheesy, it's good" movie. It was actually legitimately good. I laughed out loud at several points throughout. You just have to ignore the fact that there's no way Zac Efron grows up to look like Matthew Perry.

Role Models: I actually thought this was less funny than "17 Again." It had its moments, but it was waaaaay more lowbrow. We watched the unrated version, though. I'm sure there were more unnecessary boob shots and f-bombs than we would've gotten in theaters.

This weekend also included lots of sitting out in the sun, as it was our first truly warm weekend of the year. On both Saturday and Sunday, I went down to my complex's garden to "study" with friends. Saturday, I ended up falling asleep on a bench swing. Sunday, I did more talking than studying. I'm hoping that it'll be easier to focus once I switch to adult neurology. It's hard to learn all the details of dementia and strokes when I'm bombarded by seizures and developmental stuff all the livelong day.

----------
I worked with a new attending today, and it was pretty awesome. On rounds, he actually asked how I thought we should manage the patient I had. At first I just blinked back at him in surprise, having not truly been asked my opinion on patient management since gyn clinic back in December. When I recovered, we had a nice brief discussion, there was some teaching... rounds like I like 'em!! It was nice to have a little reminder that I can enjoy the more Medicine-y aspects of life.

Right after the Academy Awards ceremony ended last night, my roommate and I went to On Demand to see if any of the winning movies were available. We ended up watching "Once," which won Best Song. It was a simply-shot, quiet film, with a straightforward plot: Irish busker meets girl, plays music with girl, falls in love with girl. It wasn't really my type of movie, but I recommend it to each and every one of you. Whether you like the movie itself is not my concern. You need to watch it, you need to hear its soundtrack music, and you need to add that music to your life. I especially recommend "Falling Slowly" (the song that won the Oscar) and "When Your Mind's Made Up." Trust me on this. I haven't felt this strongly about music from a movie soundtrack since I first heard the line "Gold teeth and a curse for this town..." I really mean that.

"Meet the Robinsons" is the best movie I've seen in a long, long time. I highly recommend it to all of you. It's hilarious.

In the past two days, I've seen three movies. "Miss Potter," I didn't want to see, because I've had quite enough of Renee Zellweger pretending to be British. I was overruled, however, and we watched it, and it SUCKED. Then there was "Wordplay," which is all about crossword puzzles and the people who love them. That was slightly better, but not quite as good as the spelling bee movie. And tonight, we watched "Now and Then," which I somehow missed during my childhood. That was the best of the lot, if somewhat cheesy.

Today kinda sucked, Emphasis-wise. Usually I love going out to the nursing homes, but everything seemed to go wrong today. First of all, the air conditioning was broken or something. I was pretty miserable in my business attire and white coat. Then, it seemed that everybody I tried to talk to was either demented or aphasic. That is no way to get interviews done. Hopefully things will go better tomorrow.

Liz is playing the new Harry Potter game on Wii at the moment. It looks pretty darn boring. Maybe I won't have a problem with becoming addicted.

Last night/this morning, I slept from 11:30pm-1:45am, and 6:15am-8:15am. Why the weirdness? Because I (and 4 friends...I'm not that big a loser) went to the 3am showing of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" at the local IMAX. It was amazing!! The climactic battle scene was in 3D, and that was a lot less cheesy and more awesome than I expected. Obviously, a lot of stuff was cut out for the movie since the book is like 800 pages long. But for the first time of all the movies, I felt that it was done flawlessly. I didn't even notice some things were missing until our post-movie discussion. I think that you should all go see it as soon as possible. It was SO GOOD. Given the opportunity, I'd go see it again right now. Alas, I must do some work.

One of the people I work with pointed out that I won't be with them full-time that much longer. That means second year fast approacheth. There's a part of me, deep down, that knows I should be filled with dread. That part of me knows that during the wailing and gnashing of teeth that is second year, I'll look back and wonder how I could have EVER looked forward to it. That part of me is dwarfed by the part that can't wait until I'm no longer obligated to serve time in a cubicle. Hooray, second year!!

I'm pretty sure I pay for this poll-posting ability, so here goes.
Watch it here.

Poll #953849
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 5

In the trailer for "Meet the Robinsons", the bit where the T-Rex goes "I HAVE A BIG HEAD...AND LITTLE ARMS" is the funniest thing ever.

Feel free to elaborate here.

"Stomp the Yard" was okay, but didn't live up to its potential. First of all, in my opinion there should have been less plot, more step-offs. Secondly, when there was stepping or dancing, they shouldn't have used the Shaky Cam quite so much. The opening scene made me so dizzy, I had to close my eyes. It would have been nice if we were actually able to see/appreciate the choreography. I give it 3 stars.

Season premiere of "24" was excellent!! I won't spoil it for anyone, but I'll say that just when I think Jack Bauer can't get any more badass, he goes and proves me wrong. Oh, and Milo from season 1 is randomly back. And the guy who played Kumar in "Harold and Kumar go to White Castle" is in the cast, apparently expecting to be taken seriously. We'll have to wait and see about that.

Lindsay, Gore, Bryan and I went to the movies pretty much right after class today. "Snakes on a Plane" was all that I hoped it would be, and more. I think everybody should go see it. RIGHT NOW. Go ahead, I'll wait.
Insert two hours of AWESOME.
Wasn't it good?? Did the whole audience shout out the "I have had it..." line?? I hope so, because we did, and it was pretty fun. I also appreciated getting a new trivia team name, "Snakes on Crack," handed to me on a silver platter by Samuel L. Jackson himself.

Now, I've got dinner plans with some other people, and maybe a brief trip to some bar to celebrate the end of our first week. And then I have to study for the rest of the weekend.

I don't enjoy seeing movies in theaters, for several reasons. First, it's not cheap. Secondly, you just look at the screen for 2+ hours, and how is that fun? I watch a lot of TV, but I'm usually doing something else at the same time. Thirdly, you can't leave without missing something. Again, TV gives me commercial breaks during which I can go to the bathroom or get some juice or do whatever I want. Lastly, you can't talk. On the rare occasions I do feel like being social, I don't want to spend that time sitting next to my friends without being able to talk to them.

That being said, I really want to see "Inside Man", just because of the last line of the commercial. The whole thing's like, bank robbery scene, bank robbery scene, police cars, bank robbery scene, and then the last second is Denzel Washington screaming at a door: "THIS AIN'T NO BANK ROBBERY!" I want to see this movie because...why, Denzel? Why ain't it a bank robbery?

Of course, I'm so busy over the next few weeks that I'll probably forget about it as soon as the commercials stop airing.

Studied so much biochem this weekend, it's crazy. But I did take the time to watch lots of TV. The World Series..and then my three hour block on Sunday nights. The West Wing was devastating. Desperate Housewives was hilarious. Grey's Anatomy was wonderful.

Other than TV, my only breaks from biochem were trips to the gym and APhiO stuff. Since Habitat has unfortunately been put on hold for who knows how long, I'm trying to get as many other projects set up as possible. Weekdays, weekends, afternoons, evenings...you name it, I'm going to try to have us doing it. I really don't want to have to make people inactive at the end of the semester. I'll do it, but I don't want to.

Speaking of APhiO...at some point after 5pm today, all our learnlink conferences disappeared. Completely gone, without a trace. So now there's that to figure out. It sucks, but the fact that I'm a learnlink packrat has finally paid off. Pretty much every message I ever sent to any APhiO conference remains in my inbox. That's especially useful for signups, which, it turns out, update themselves as they're edited. It just sucks that the LL coordinator has this to deal with, so close to this huge biochem exam. Somebody should buy the woman some coffee, or something.

Film screening for French. A movie called "Xala," which was okay. It was in French and a Senegalese language called Wolof. But we didn't know that. We were all following the French scenes pretty well, not really needing the subtitles. Then came the first Wolof scene...actually, one character spoke French and the other would respond in Wolof. It was funny...you could see everybody's head bobbing from the subtitles to the actor's mouth, like "Why don't I understand any of these words?" Then the moment of "Ah, it's not French" realization.

Lyrics of the day, from my current music:
If you stay too long inside my memory
I will trap you in a song tied to a melody
And I'll keep you there so you can't bother me.

I need to buy so much music.

Soooo, I finally saw "Garden State" last night. (In fact, it was from in front of the TV that I sprinted when word came that scores were up.) I didn't really like it that much! Does that make me a bad Millennial? I certainly wouldn't call it the greatest movie ever. Of course, it probably suffered from what I call the "Finding Nemo" effect. I don't like going to movie theaters, so I hardly ever see movies until they've been out on DVD for a while. That means I've heard people raving about how wonderful the movie is for so long, I've built up an inflated idea of its greatness. Or it could just be that I have an odd taste in movies, I dunno. Anyway, Zach Braff staring blankly for two hours. "I'm numb, I've never felt anything." Whoop-de-doo. Apparently the appeal of the movie was how it was just "real" and "not really about anything." If I want real and not about anything, I've got my own life for that. I watch movies to be entertained.

Worst of all, the parts that were supposedly funny were too...stuck in there just for the gag. The wallpaper thing, the doctor with a diploma on the ceiling...that stuff would have been hilarious had it logically followed some sort of set up. The one part that made me actually laugh out loud was the clapper bit. Because it made sense in the context of what was going on at the time. (Maybe it's the stand-up comedian in me that makes me believe punch lines should have set ups.) Other than that, the single high point of the movie was hearing the opening whistling of "Caring is Creepy," which made me smile because I just really, really like that song.

Well, that's enough negativity for today. It's not even 10am (already in the lab, thank you very much!), and I have definitely surpassed my shit-eating-grin quota for the day. See my userpic? Imagine that, only less caught-while-laughing jubilance and more relieved smirk. Whooo! Now I've got to finish my AMCAS app for real, and seriously reexamine my list of schools. But not right now. For now, I do statistical thermodynamics.

Somehow, Uncle Kenny managed to drag me away from tournament coverage long enough to go see a movie with him and Kiki. "Be Cool." On the whole, it was really funny. It's the sequel to "Get Shorty," and there were some clunky jokes that referenced the first movie. The fact that the references were obvious to me proves how clunky they were, since I've never seen "Get Shorty." There were also some meta-commentary jokes that fell flat. Like Steven Tyler saying "I'm not the kind of rock star that does movies!" As he played himself in a movie!! Get it?? Hahaha..ha..a. But. With that stuff aside, the movie was still hilarious. Seriously. Go see it now.

Another thing everybody should see now: the Coke with lime commercial. "You put the lime in the Coke, you nut." Catchiest thing ever. I love how the boss is all doubtful, and then they cut to him explaining it to the boardpeople.

As far as the tournament goes...I'll assess the damage to my bracket after tomorrow's games are over. I will just say, picking LSU to go to the Elite 8 may have been a mistake. Emotions over logic, and all that.

Rachel: Kat, you're going to get us shot!!
Kat: We're in Buckhead.
Rachel: So we'll be shot by a really expensive gun!

Good times...went to Phipps and saw Vanity Fair. I liked it a lot. Before the movie we saw three consecutive previews for Jude Law movies. Which is great; just this morning I was thinking "Jude Law needs to be in more movies. Simultaneously."

DUCBrunch is still alive and well. Or at least alive. No omelettes or waffles yet, but we were told they will return.

Then I watched TV and thought about getting some work done. Then I thought about it some more. I did this while watching two episodes of Queer Eye and some Olympic basketball games.

I finally worked up the motivation to be productive: skimmed my English reading, then read through some of Dr. Kindt's material. I can now state what I'll be doing ...Using computational methods to study phase transitions in equilibrium polymers.

After I got tired of that, I decided to drink about 20 oz. of cranberry juice. I'm still feeling the effects of that.

Called Mommy.

It seems like I didn't do very much to fill the day, but then I remember that the day didn't even start until almost 1.

Then I went to the movies with a few of my homies. We saw Without a Paddle...it wasn't the best movie ever, but it was no Soul Plane, either. Thanks to Casey's mom, any time the movie got a little slow I could bust out the finger puppets. Whee!

I'm tired.

I saw Spiderman 2 with my dad. Neither of us ever bothered to see the first Spiderman, but we'd both heard this one was really good. And we figured that it wouldn't be terribly hard to figure out what was going on. And it wasn't.

But maybe seeing the first one would've unlocked some secret key to liking this one. I thought it sucked. It made Daredevil look good in comparison. Plot-wise and dialogue-wise, I'd say the two were even. But Spiderman 2 was soooo bad, visually. But at least while watching Daredevil, it felt like I was watching a stupid movie based on a comic book, NOT a stupid moving comic book. I'm sure some are praising the style to the high heavens, but it just didn't do anything for me. Most of the freaking shots were of Tobey MacGuire's vacant stare, sometimes alternated with Tobey MacGuire's troubled-looking vacant stare. Boooo, vacant stare. Boooo, Spiderman 2.

Okay everybody, you can stop staring at me now. I have seen "Finding Nemo." Unfortunately, having people tell me it's "the best movie ever!!!" and hearing quotes from it for months and months hurt my impression of it. I was half-expecting to have to blind myself at the end, because I would never again behold something so wonderful. I had my keys next to me for that very purpose. However, despite the wonderful animation, that was not to be. I really liked it, but no movie could ever live up to that hype. It's hard to laugh at lines you've heard a bunch of times, even if they weren't really in context before. My fault, I guess, for being a loser who hardly ever goes to the movies.

My mom has been staying at my aunt's house since she left the hospital, because she doesn't want to be alone while Dad's at work. I called earlier tonight, and they were dyeing Easter eggs. With one of those fancy kits that lets you do spiralling designs, even. After I talked to Mom, I called Dad. We had a nice conversation once I convinced him that I just called to say hi, not to ask for money or tell him about some school problem.

The offical cleanliness ranking of rooms 304-306:
Danielle: The girl cleans for fun. If she's upset about something, she cleans. If she's bored, she cleans.
Desirina: I don't think she cleans for fun, and she does sometimes leave her coffee-making mess, but overall she's a lot neater than...
Me: I consider the floor perfectly usable storage space for papers and books. And my jacket is just fine right where I took it off.
Jenn: Disgusting. Goes beyond my sloppy messiness to nasty medical waste messiness. She considers the floor perfectly usuable disposal space for her diabetic stuff, and is morally opposed to cleaning the bathroom.

I was suddenly inspired to do that ranking as I stepped over a freaking used test strip on the floor. I'm glad she's rarely in here; the boy's room must be horrible.

Goodnight.

..but they never tell that story.

Casey, Kathryn, Danielle and I went to see "Win a Date with Tad Hamilton." That movie...changed. My. Life. Only... not really. It was cheesy and predictable, but I don't mind. Classes, not movies, are for making me think.

On the way to the theater, my roommate called. She locked herself out of the room without a shirt. I laugh at her for always forgetting her keys, but this one was new. Hahahaha. I'm an awful person. Speaking of roommate! The living situation for next year is (hopefully) decided for good. Yay. I still say that if they just put a cafeteria in the chem building, I'd live there. Oh well.

• One thing I wouldn't leave home without
  
• Something that reminds me of my favorite TV sitcom.

This is what I need to bring to my Orientation Leader interview (which I was finally able to sign up for, thank you very much). Ideas? I have a few of things in mind, but they all involve pretending that "24" is a sitcom. Which could be funny, but there's still a big chance that the interviewers won't know what "24" is. And then it'd just suck.

What else what else what else? Nothing.

Katie and I had so much fun. Yay! We watched three movies, "Waiting for Guffman," "A Mighty Wind," and "Drum Line." Hahaha. The first two were really funny. The last was funny in that there was all this tension, and these serious moments over...the marching band. No offense to any marching band people out there but it is hard to feel tension when conflicts are settled by "drum-offs."

We also watched the Rose Bowl, but Michigan played so horribly that I'd rather not think of that. Not that I had a whole lot riding on the game. A split national championship for LSU is still good.

Speaking of LSU, I've decided that LSU fans are absolutely mad. Katie thought it would help to 'be in the LSU atmosphere.' I only thought this was a little weird, because I'm pretty superstitious myself. And of course I want to help out LSU's cause. So I was perfectly willing to go along. We went to Tiger Mania, and Katie bought two car flags, and a tiger tail to dangle from her trunk. We then went to campus to drive around Tiger Stadium, for good luck. Then we got out of the car, walked around the Stadium, touching the 1958 national champions plaque when we passed it. Then we went to see the mascot, Mike the tiger. THEN we ate at Raising Cane's, the traditional post-game restaurant.

The craziest part of this pilgrimage/ritual is, we weren't the only ones doing it. There were sooo many other people doing the exact same things. Including a family...mom, dad, and three girls who were dressed up in LSU cheerleader costumes. And...an old couple buying giant tiger tails, which they then wore. Two guys in Oklahoma shirts showed up, and I sincerely feared for their lives. But the worst they got were stares. You can't be violent when you're on a pilgrimage.

Went to see "Love, Actually" with Danielle and Christy and Kathryn. I wore black stuff, just so I could wear THE GLOVES. Hehe. Anyway, I liked the movie a lot! We got there late, so we had to sit in the very first row. Because the screen's kinda curvy, I actually saw the whole movie...tilted. One day I'll have to see it normal. On the way back, we noticed that Danielle can stand up straight, in three-inch platforms, inside Christy's minivan. I was very amused.

Before going to the movie, I stood out in the parking lot and watched the lunar eclipse. I had actually forgotten about it, until some random person on Achaea was like, "Go look at the lunar eclipse!" So I went. I watched for a while, until the strip of moon became total darkness. It wasn't as impressive as the one I saw when I was little, but it was still cool.

PS- Tara's countdowns made me realize that I only get to be 18 for six more weeks. I think I'll try to ask for an extension.

I am trying to work on college essays, but my writer's block is huge. Every single thing I write sounds so incredibly stupid. I should've started really working on this long ago. I'm never going to finish in time...gah, gah, gah!

Beta district rally was today. Our quiz bowl team won, but it was much too close for comfort. We're going to have to study more. Our team chemistry could also use some working on. Well, today was just for practice, anyway.

Went to the movies with Becca, Sarah M., and Allison. We saw "Riding in Cars with Boys"...it was GOOD.