yea man

I've developed kind of an odd habit of blogging in my head.

This happens every once in a while and tends to be during the times that I post in greater frequencies.

An interesting event will happen, and immediately I narrate the situation in my head.

I kinda like it.

So I been home since Friday. The entire time I've been here has felt different than I initially expected, but for the most part in a good way.

This hit me at Kaden's house, plopped down on the kitchen couch chatting with Tyson, who I hadn't seen or talked to in a strangely long time. However, despite the fact that it had been so long since we'd talked, both of us suddenly made the realization that it basically felt like I hadn't ever left.

I'm not sure what I was expecting when I got home. I was here for two days just over a month ago, but I kinda feel like that didn't count. Nothing really has changed here, and I kind of like it that way; everything is extremely smooth and natural, especially on the home front.

My parents plainly haven't been negatively affected by the whole empty nest thing they got goin on. In fact they seem to kind of be thriving in mine and my sister's absence. The house is obscenely clean on a constant basis, and its kind of sick how neat everything is.

Luckily a few hours into being home I somehow managed to spill the contents of the greater part of a tooth paste tube across the counter of my bathroom. Luckily no one has noticed.... Except when my mom reads this I'm guessing she'll storm downstairs in a slight fury.

Its currently snowing pretty hella. We got a few inches last night, and about an hour ago it started to come down again, and pretty nicely.

Driving in this stuff is fun as ever, as getting up the hill to my house required me to pin my car at about 4500rpm in 1st gear, jumping up to the 6k range every few feet.

Lately I've kind of been missing my old car. (For those of you unacquainted with my previous set of wheels, read about it here: http://stothak.blogspot.com/2010/05/peace-out-car.html

While I by no means regret the upgrade to my Sentra, the Hyundai was a helluva lot easier to drive in the snow.

The issue with my current car is that its got a lot more power than my previous ride. This means that pretty much as soon as the engine connects to the wheels, I lose tractions because they spin to fast. This is all good and fun (really fun :) during the summer when traction is for wimps, but serves to make driving a bit challenging with a few inches of frozen water upon the ground.

Challenging as it may be, I tend to look at the roads and declare that the challenge has been accepted, and proceed to slip and slide through neighborhoods.

What's something that is currently pissing you off, you ask?

http://www.kndu.com/Global/story.asp?S=13550942

That.

There are two very annoying things I take from this.

1. People are freaking idiots and need to learn to drive, especially in the snow. To the jackass in the dually truck behind me: I understand that the speed limit is 40, however due to the fact that I can't actually see the road due to the snow, I'm gonna hug a number closer to 30. Just because you have 6 wheels of American idiocy under you doesn't give you the right to tailgate a person with a practical vehicle.

In case you were too lazy to read the article, there was a 6 car pileup caused by some idiot who likely had a mindset much like macho man in the truck I just mentioned. He put the lives of him+at least 5 others in danger because he or she isn't afraid of no snow.

2. The part near the bottom. Apparently, a police officer can pull someone over and ticket them $124, for driving at literally any speed imaginable, despite the fact that it could be far lower than the speed limit. Sure, if someone is doing 50 in a 50 combating 3 inches of ice and snow, I would probably slap them in the face with a $124 charge as well. But the fact that an officer can pull someone over even going 15 under and ticket them upwards of a hundred dollars is kind of sickening to me.

I say this because just about every encounter with a police officer in the last 4 years has been extremely unpleasant, and the officer in question usually makes a jackass of himself or herself because they can't seem to come home from their power trip. For instance, when I was being a dumbass and got a speeding ticket, the officer was able to slap on an addition $134 because he thought my exhaust was too loud. Imagine what the good ol' West Richland police will do when they seem some teenager driving cautiously, daring to approach the halfway mark of the speed limit.

It seems like there should be some kind of ratio of speed limit to snow. Not like some sort of strict rule, but more of a guideline.

It seems that police cars, Ford Crown Victorias, with a huge 4.6 liter V8 in the front, and the drive train in rear would mean rather poor handling in the snow.

Not sure where I'm going with this, so I'm gonna go attempt to drive to the movie theater and see HP7 with some homies.

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popo shut us down

Today began in just about the exact same manner in which every other Monday of this academic year has: my phone and alarm clock simultaneously begin to make their loud noises which I have become conditioned to associate with pain and annoyance, and I seriously consider not going to my first class.

After hitting snooze on both devices about 3 times, and realizing that I'm probably not going to win the fight to stay asleep, I somehow remember that GenEd is by far my easiest class and isn't really worth skipping.

I then somehow descended my dangerously shaky ladder, and more or less start my day. I managed to stay awake all through GenEd, and I was even coherent until about 10 minutes after at which point I was out cold until 12:50 rolled around, and the process repeated itself for math.

After math I kind of slept from 3-7:30.

Well, I guess I know what I'm not doing tonight.

On the upside, I just completed my 5-7 page paper for my english class. Its the last actual paper for the class, and so I'm relatively pumped that it is finally out of the way.


There seemed to be some sort of theme for Canadians today.

My math teacher, who is originally from some country I can't pronounce in the Middle East, harbors an extremely strong, slightly stereotypical Indian accent. This kind of makes a lot of the things he says far more entertaining than they where originally intended, if at all.

Case in point: he is doing a math problem on the chalk board, being completely serious as usual. Suddenly, halfway through calculating some ridiculous problem, he looks up, smiles, and announces "Mmmmm.... This problem reminds me of Canada." I kind of lost it.

The next example comes from my dear mother.



The first few parts are irrelevant, we were discussing the jelly you can buy in squeezable tubes.

Which brings me to my next topic: peanut butter.

First off, I kind of hate peanut butter companies. Why, WHY do you package your product in a container that is far more lean than wide? Once you get about halfway through, it is damn near impossible to scoop out the stuff from the bottom. Why don't they make it into some kind of short square thing? Arg. Srsly.

Anyhoo, in my household, if one left any minuscule amount of peanut butter on a knife, not only would my mother indefinitely find it and trace it back to you, she would go on to explain that she could easily have made five sandwiches with the stuff you wasted. Moving on, if you were ever to dispose of a peanut butter container with peanut butter still inside... You might as well have stolen some poor starving African child's food for the next year.

Now, my parents by no means had too many ridiculous rules or constraints or whatevs. At the same time, they didn't exactly let me run wild. With that in mind, let me tell you how good it feels to waste that last bit of peanut butter without my mother descending from the ceiling to tell me off.

Btw, I had one hell of an interesting weekend. For all you Tri kids reading this, I'll recap that to you in person... in 4 days when in home. Hailllllllllllllllll yes.

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purple stain

So I'm in 7th grade and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is out and appears to be just about the coolest thing ever.

The issue was that I was about 12 years old and my mommy had a funny habit of watching the news. With the arrival of Jack Thompson of the scene, the cool thing for news networks at the time was to bash anything with an M rating.

Long story short, 12 year old Sean never got the chance to play the hot new game.

Looking back, that might not have been a bad thing- Now that I'm in college, I bought the game that was the shit back in '04, and there isn't a thing my mommy can do about it.

Case in point: one of the objectives in the game is to steal specific cars. Today, I'm walking down the street here in Pullman and see the real life version of car I need to steal in the game. I mentally pressed the button to steal the car, and after realizing that I indeed had not stolen the real life car, I noticed that I may need to take a break from the rebellious video game playing.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand back to my day. It was rather dandy.

The sorority Alpha Delta Pi (I think...) had their formal get together thingy tonight, and I ended up attending the event with Leslie. This meant two things, a lot of dancing, and me wearing pants for my first time since being here.

The pants part kinda sucked. But the dancing was cool.

There seems to be some sort of curse when it comes to me and formal dances, if tonight/senior prom are any indication.

I could have sworn that Leslie said we needed to meet at 7:45. So, when I rolled out of bed at 6:30, started watching and episode of scrubs completely unprepared for anything fancy, I was a bit taken aback when I was informed that I should drive to Sorority's house ASAP.

I managed to get completely ready and whatnot in about 8 minutes. Even for a dude, I think thats kind of impressive. I retrieved my car from the lot, picked up Shakeila from Stephenson, abducted Randy from a street corner (not kidding) and picked up Leslie and Taylor from their house.

My only complaint about the dance was the lack of Lady Gaga, with the exception of a rather horrible remix of telephone.

Finally, I returned home, crashed for a few hours, and chillaxed with the bros.

Oh what? 6 days till home? Hailllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll Yea.

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i need money

I really wish it were snowing right now.

The weather predictions as of late have been playing a cruel game with us Pullman kids, as snow is consistently predicted about 3 days in the future, but the future seems to be unreachable as far as weather is concerned.

I'm gonna be honest: the only reason I'm really blogging right now is that I climbed into bed, realized I don't have my headphones with me, and am too lazy to climb back down and tear apart my recently cleaned room to retrieve them, just so that I can watch some pointless episode of a random tv show in Netflix. This brings me to my first point.

I kind of detest organization in the classical sense.

When my room is a mess, it tends to be because I place things in odd places (adurrrrrrr). The thing is, these odd places are the locations that I find most logical.

For instance, I have a pile of socks right by my chair as opposed to my sock drawer. Why? Because I generally sit down to put on socks, and its kind of hard to sit down on a drawer.

So when I desperately try to avoid homework or studying by organizing and reorganizing my living space, I tend to regret it shortly after. Not due to the fact that I hadn't studied, but simply because my room is too damn organized for me to find anything.

Next up, is trying new things. Mainly foods.

From a young age, my parents have encouraged me to try new foods before saying "ew."

9 times out of 10 my original "ew" prediction proves completely accurate.

Current case in point: the "Chef's creations" section of the nearest dining center, Southside.

They have this odd habit of serving foods from "around the world." My problem is that whenever something resembles actual food to the point where it may be edible, I hear my Mom's voice saying "Oh trust me, you'll like this."

And dammit Mom, YOU ARE WRONG AGAIN. I had tofu for the first and (hopefully) last time the other night.

In other news, math is stupid.

In the first week or so I was here, I managed to get into a conversation with a guy from my floor about our math classes.

He asked what math I'm in, and I replied "Eh, I'm kind of in retarded math... 105."

Silence for a few seconds, then his reply "Yea, I'm in math 99."

I'm relatively confident that my major will be largely decided by whatever course does not require a lot of math or science. I'd like to say that english would be in the category of classes I wish to not take, thanks much to my english 101 class. However, majors not including math science or english.... Well I could always work at the Racquet Club for the rest of my life.

So my english class. It's freshman english, and I'm the only freshman in the class. The amount of apathy produced by the other students in the class is nearly palpable, and seems to be rather contagious. The assignments, while not excruciatingly difficult, are rather unlike high school level papers (again adurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrh.)

Most of them revolve around research, and quoting things, and MLA format, and garbage like that.

In a sick sort of way I miss writing high school level papers. Honors english junior year is still by far the most difficult english class that I have been enrolled in, but at least the papers came from my brain, and not from someone else's. WSU goes on and on about plagiarism and how bad it is, which strikes me as a bit odd when the majority of my 5-7 page paper has to consist of what other people think or say.

Hmph.

Finally, this guy:

One week ago today, this guy hacked into all of the projectors of two buildings here at WSU, Todd and Sloan halls.

The video played once an hour from for all of the academic day in every class room of the two buildings.

No matter how you spin it, its impressive. WSU has a retarded amount of idiotic security that I'm assuming took quite some time to set up, and this guy completely bypasses it. Not only has he yet to be caught, he actually masked the location that the infiltration to place from, making it seem as though the action was performed from Elson Floyd's residence. (BTW, thats our school's president.)

Having been here for not even a full semester, I can already say that I like what the guy has to say. Several people reacted in a similar manner to when someone criticizes America, jumping to the conclusion that the naysayer is opposed to everything good and holy, when in reality they are simply making a legitimate point that we can learn from.

I guess I can say that I'm pretty interested to see what happens in 358 days, when it is again the 5th of November.

Oh, and I'm pretty excited for what happens in one week: Home.

P.S. Really elections? We are again stuck with Hastings and Murray, liquor sales are the same, and to top it all off prop 19 somehow didn't go through down in Cali town, and to top that all of the derps at Central got 4lokos banned in Washington.

And now I guess Imma go find those headphones.

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Its been a weird couple of days

This week has been one of the strangest of my college experience.

It began Monday morning, in my attempt to fix my sleep schedule by pulling an all nighter. The idea made a lot of sense in my head, yet when put into effect, kind of failed. I passed through my Monday classes in a Zombie like state, falling asleep at 2:30, waking up close to 8.

The whole nocturnal thing didn't really help the cold I was developing, and when the two where put together it made for a pretty shitty first half of the week. Luckily, Advil PM is still legal and knocked me the eff out on Wednesday night.

Pullman is kind of a strange place at 5 in the morning. In my restless state, I ventured a walk outside on Monday morning to wake myself up. (I'll come back to this...)

So parking here. It kinda sucks. Most lots require a pass at all times, but a select few allow parking on the weekends, or between the hours of 5pm to 5am.

They are pretty serious about the 5am thing.

Wandering out the parking lot right outside my dorm, a white truck with "WSU Parking" scribed on the side pulls up and parks in the middle of the lot. A few seconds later, he starts writing people tickets.

The interesting thing is that he left the truck running while issuing the BS tickets to the unsuspecting cars.

I think back to the tickets acquired by Ben and I at the beginning of the year totaling $105 between the two of us, and consider how it might go down if I jack the truck and drive off into the night.

Then I remembered I was functioning on a few hours worth of sleep, and sadly decided against it.

But that would have made for a very interesting Monday.



Oh yea, update on the quiet hours nonsense from the last blog-

The petition. After having most of my floor signing it, to no avail, we figured its time to get more of the building in on the shenanigans. I figured that freshman focus classes (a bunch of people from one building in a class) would be a good place to get a lot of signatures in a small time period. I ask my buddy Uris to talk to our professor about passing the petition through the class.

So, if you've ever had a class with me, spent time with me for an extended period of time, or even met me once or twice, you've probably deduced that I don't really like attention all that much.

With that in mind, you can imagine my surprise when Uris told me that I would be speaking to my GenEd class this Friday.

There's aboot 125 people in the class usually, most of whom live in my building.

I was given an entire minute to explain to the class what we were doing, and I used maybe 30 seconds of it. I think it could have gone a lot worse though, as the redness factor of my face didn't get to far past its usual tone.

Anyhoo, the paper got passed through maybe 45 people, about 30 of whom signed it. Not bad on a small scale, but considering there are still around 80 people who didn't even see it... Eh, we'll hit the class again on Monday I'm guessing.

Total signatures=53. Roughly 300 people live in North Tower, so I think we're off to a decent start.

And two weeks from now, I'll be chillin with my Tri-Town homies once again.

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Slightly annoyed

Entering floor #4 of the North tower in the Stephenson Complex, one may notice a nearly palpable feeling of pissiness.

Rewind to last Thursday. The majority of residents living in Stephenson North, including myself are at an extra credit movie event. Partway through, the RA (basically the floor babysitter) from the 13th floor sends out a mass facebook message to most of the residents here.

The message reads:

"Hey North!!!!

Starting now until the end of the semester, Sun-Thurs nights 8-11PM are study hours in the lounge. This means the TV will not be turned on and only people who are quiet should be in the lounge.

I'm sorry for any inconvenience these study hours may cause. This is supposed to be for the benefit of all and has been implemented on EVERY FLOOR by our RED. Please this time wisely.

Good luck on the rest of your semester!

I hope that you have a wonderful day!! =D"

I sat in awe for a few seconds after reading the message. A few seconds later, I was in my RA's room delivering my thoughts on the ordeal in my usual diplomatic(ish) way. As usual, my efforts where completely useless, as someone else from my floor burst into the room and informed my RA that the new rule is "FUCKING BULLSHIT."

It didn't take long for us to get together and realize how idiotic these new "Study Hours" are as a floor. Before the night was over, I had written up this petition, and gotten 20+ signatures from our floor alone:

Lounge (n): A place for lounging: a room in a private home or public building for leisure.

Wandering the floors of Stephenson North, one would probably notice a door on every floor labeled “Lounge.” One would then logically conclude from this that the room is intended for leisure activities, per the definition of the word. However, given the new “Study Hours,” it seems as though the word lounge is no longer an accurate description of the room.

We, the residents of Stephenson North tower, find the recent rule changes concerning study hours in the lounge to be unfair, ineffective, and downright ridiculous. The purpose of living in a residence hall, aside from education benefit, is largely to form friendships with fellow newcomers to Pullman. One of the most significant places that this occurs at is on the floor lounges. Speaking from the perspective of the 4th floor, our lounge is the place in which we come to socialize and unwind with our recently made friends. This often occurs in the later hours of the night, after we have finished homework and other necessary activities. The new hours interfere directly with this, as the bulk of our social activities take place in the lounge between the hours of 6 P.M. and 12 A.M. For instance, we often watch sporting events as a floor. Football games often run past 8, and World Series games are likely to be on during this time.

It is not as if the lounge is the only available quiet space to work; Holland and Terrell libraries offer ample space for quiet study, as does the Stephenson library. If for some reason these options are unavailable, I believe that all residents have a room in which they can study.

Imagine if a library dedicated 3 of its busiest hours, five days a week, to not reading, working, or doing library related things in general. Sounds pretty similar to me.

Oh, and did I mention that Stephenson North is the only building in all of WSU to have these rules?

The next day, the signed petition was given to the RED (manager of the building) who ultimately ignored it.

That was Friday.

Between Halloween parties and the weekend in general, we managed to calm down on the issue for the most part, until tonight.

Six of us are sitting in the lounge, two doing work, three pretending to, and one sitting quietly watching TV.

The RA walks in, and informs the brave soul that he needs to either work on something or leave. He refuses, and is promptly given an IR (incident report, you get enough, and you get kicked out of the dorm.)

So this guy was given an IR for quietly watching TV in the lounge, which is meant for leisurely activities.

Sadly, the bullshit doesn't end there.

With 4 seconds left on the clock in a rather important sporting event, our RA jerks the TV's power cable out of the wall.

Things apparently calmed down for a bit after that, until the lounge has 4 guys in it. All of them (including the one who was already given an IR) have some sort of work in their hands, and are talking while working.

Talking.

4 IRs later, our lounge is now "permanently" locked.

Oh, and our Kitchen privileges are being threatened.

So, to sum it up: 4 students, while working on homework, were talking. Because of this, we don't have access to a lounge anymore, and we may not be able to use our microwave or sink in the near future.

Lucky for us, we're a bunch of pissy teenagers who will very unlikely simply take this whole situation sitting down.

Something tells me petitioning won't cut it much longer.

And thats pretty much whats on my mind tonight. Also, I've become nocturnal.

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