"Life Tip #53"

Don't get a girlfriend who will crash your car.

If you do get a girlfriend who will crash your car, don't give her the keys.

If you get a girlfriend who will crash your car and give her the keys and see the crash while riding in a passing bus, don't try to commandeer the bus.

If you get a girlfriend who will crash your car and give her the keys and see the crash while riding in a passing bus and try to commandeer the bus, don't crash the bus.

< /quote Funny Class Notes>
Artwork by Sitji Chou. Ha.

Studying and Cooking

If I was a cooking vessel, I'd be a porcelain pot. Not just any porcelain pot, a clay pot with the approximate thickness of Hobbes' Leviathan. If you are unsure of just how thick the Leviathan is, well, it's very thick. It's insane how much time is required for me to spend before I become productive. The porcelain pot is notorious for taking an extremely lengthy amount of time for it to become thoroughly hot, and sustain enough heat to produce edible food. Me, I take hours, or even days before I finally gather enough momentum to complete my assignments.

Three days is more than a reasonable amount of time to compose a 1500 word essay. In fact, with two days, you could research your essay, re-read your text, write an outline, book mark quotations, compose, and proofread your essay and still have enough time to review your french notes, watch The Bicycle Thieves, fight undead orcs in the dungeon, and maybe even catch Yojimbo down at the Pacific Cinématheque. But of course, like the stupidly dense pot that I am, I manage to spend the first two and three quarters of my three days not writing my essay. Where did those two and 3/4 days go? Well, I spent a generous amount of that time on "attempting to work". If I was still taking math classes I could write an equation for my productivity...
But to take a crack at it, it'd probably look something like this:

productivity = (attempted study time)/20

So if I had two hours to work on an assignment, I'd probably be looking at less than twenty minutes of actual work done. How this pertains to the equation, I don't know. But I do know that most of that time would've been spent on repetitively re-reading paragraphs, playing minesweeper obsessively, reading Slashdot and drawing hybrid animals in the margins of my pages.

So on the particular weekend of my epic essay writing endeavors, having spent grueling hours(two days) of pre-working, and attempting to work, the tiny gear lodged in the corner of my brain which controls my academic motivation finally begins to turn three hours before midnight, signaling the last day before my due date. And boy did the gear turn, although it's rusty from infrequent use, my motivation finally rose to a healthy level and my essay began to take shape.

I proceeded to spend the next ten consecutive hours or so writing and phrasing while taking frequent short breaks to minesweep, and to pace my room whining and moaning about how terrible a writer I am. Now I could have finished after about seven hours, but by then I had already passed my "point-of-no-return" (if you're curious, it's about 5am in the morning) where I ultimately decide to forgo sleep for the night because I'll almost certainly oversleep my remaining two hours before the morning. Having decided to abandon the sweet thought of sleep, I was left with an additional three hours before 7:30am to fine-tune my essay, and for the first time since being in Arts One; proof read. It was torture, the night. Not to mention I spent all of the next day suffering the repercussions of skipping sleep.

Although given an approrpiate amount of time to warm up(a large amount of the heat coming from sheer pressure), I can be pressed to produce essays of a delectable quality. But despite that, and despite my efficacy with working under pressure, being a clay pot ultimately sucks.

100 Movies, 100 Quotes, 100 Numbers

How many movies can you recognize? Even if you're not much of a cinephile, I'd guarantee you'd recognize at least two.

A Movie A Day

I was having a conversation with a friend once, and he said, "hey, since you've joined the Film Society, you much be watching a lot of movies all the time eh?" It sounds like a more than reasonable assumption, and really, it is. But sadly enough, at the time that I was posed with that question almost two months ago, I couldn't say yes.

I've been trying to keep a very detailed list of every movie title that I have ever seen in my life on my computer for a couple of years now (Fun Fact# 134), most of it is alphabetized, but the bottom portion of the list is entirely chronological. When I reviewed all of the accumulated movies since the end of the summer, the number is anything but pleasing. I really haven't watched many movies throughout the three months since becoming a club member at the dawn of the school year. This realization saddened me greatly, and I decided to take action. I needed to watch more movies, and I needed to set a plan. This couldn't be one of those vague and ambiguous goals that people often give themselves such as "be more organized", or "exercise more" only to forget about them once their passion and determination fizzles out, I had to give myself a measurable resolution.

So it was about the time of my previous post, the day before my exam, whilst in the midst of procrastination, I decided to watch a movie, Trainspotting it was. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and I thought gee, spending the time to watch a movie didn't take up as much of my study time as I thought it would, I wouldn't have to study anymore after this exam, I could easily watch a movie everyday if I wanted to, and what better time to give yourself a hefty, ambitious film related project than during the chilly and festive, and -most importantly- school-less month of December? So it was decided, an inverted New Year's Resolution. I was to watch a movie a day, until the start of the new semester (January 7th).

I'll have to admit, there were times when I feared that I would not be able to accomplish my twenty-two movies in twenty two days endeavor. But I was dilligent, and prevailed. If I had missed a movie somehow, I would make up for the deficit by viewing two movies the next day, and I kept it up for three full weeks. It was a very lifting experience for me, I was able to finally cross off some longtime tenants on my Wanted: movie list.

For those who are interested: (not many of you, I'd imagine)
As well as for personal accomplishment/boasting purposes, I have attached the list of the movies below:



If you're thinking the same thing that I am (man that was a shitty post, and Sandie is a terrible writer), I apologize in advance. Once my brain defrosts from the lull of the holidays I will post more silly anecdotes from Sandie's life.

Super Powers

I've always had abysmal study and work habits ever since I can remember being in school. It's been several years since my first escapade into grade school, and not much has changed. Instead of becoming increasingly more fluent when studying over the years, I've become more and more proficient at procrastination. In fact, I've become so skillful that I can procrastinate without doing anything, I can procrastinate while staring at my textbook. During the most inopportune hours of the day, my mind will simply float away, far from the lonely textbook that lies agape dutifully in front of me. Far far away it will float, into the outer reaches of the universe, where my mind will entertain itself with a myriad of ideas, most of which will have about as much relevance to my current subject of study as religion is to civil law.

So today, I was on one of my ordinary forays into the sea of overstudying-induced hallucination when an extraordinary idea penetrated the opulence of ninja warriors and cats clouding my mind and came into focus. Brace yourselves, everyone, for I present to you, the power of the Freudian Analysis. Haven't you ever wondered what it would be like if there was someone out there who could harness the legendary powers of Sigmund Freud? Superheroes and manga heroes are always gifted with the powers inspired by ancient gods and deities, (i.e. Sailor Moon, Naruto, Ororo/Storm, etc.) It's about time we had a proprietor of power whom we can all relate to. There will be no more awe-inspiring elemental manipulation, no more potentially destructive powers such as super strength, speed, or animorphosis. The destructive potential of the Freudian Analysis will lie purely in the psyche.

The lucky inheritor of this cutting edge technique will be endowed with the super ability to analyze any situation and circumstance with a psychoanalytic touch. In public places such as the art gallery, it will be child's play for our hero to psychoanalyze all pieces of artwork within mere seconds. A spin can be placed on anything and everything to resemble all the different faces of dormant sexual desires. In practice, all of Georgia O'Keefe's flowers become barren and lonely vaginas decorated with garish, artificial colours, and Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe becomes a manifestation of his insecurity and fear of commitment due to his desires to bed a multitude of women, whom despite their differing complexion and skins, are all the same underneath. Our hero will have an infinite number of subjects for which to hone his talents, being the urban city-dweller that he is. But he must remember to never use his gift on himself or his loved ones, lest he cripples their psyche for all of eternity.

Once our gallant hero has mastered his powers of the Freudian Analysis, he will be ready to fight evil. Now our super psychoanalyst may suffer a deficit in STR and AGI, but his unrivaled INT and LUK will offset and compensate for his shortcomings. Skillfully and stealthily he will use his peerless intelligence to infiltrate corporate office buildings. Once he has entered enemy territories he will hunt down all of the company heads and CEO's: the proprietors behind evil advertisements, and false logical slogans such as "i'm lovin' it", and "embrace diversity". Then he will unleash his deadly techniques of the Freudian Analysis and mentally scar his enemies through immense psychological torture by convincing them that they have lived their lives wholly in effort to satisfy some (previously)unknown and inane sexual desires, and that these efforts have been in vain because they had become corrupted by power and can no longer accomplish their sexual dreams since the onset of old age, obesity, hair loss, and arthritis two dozen years ago. His enemies will become thoroughly dispirited and fall into utter depravity until they commit suicide.

Over and over again, I played the triumphant episodes of my psychoanalytic hero in my mind, as the corners of my mouth curved into a ridiculous grin and drool glossed over the edge of my lips. I remained in that absurd state for approximately fifteen minutes before my mind ascended from the outer galaxies and returned to Function Calls and Event Handlers. I'm going to need all the LUK I can get for my exam tomorrow.

Secrets of the Sauce Industry Revealed!

I was surfing around deviantart today, hoping to kindle some kind of creative spirit for my visual arts assignment, when I came across this scandalous conspiracy, so shocking and disturbing i had to share it with all my readers (yes, all three of you);


Here is what the artist had to say on this fishy topic:

Ok ok ok ok ok... this is a scientific illustration based on the theory that all sauce comes from various breeds of sauce weasel. They just lay packets of sauce like chickens lay eggs. Each breed produces its own unique sauce and each has its characteristics. For instance the soy sauce weasel maintains a fully vegetarian diet. The elusive secret sauce weasel is in actuality a cross breed of a ketchup weasel and a salad dressing ferret. The American BBQ weasel is most active during summer and the Worcestershire weasel has a fondness for fish in its diet. The Mexican hot sauce breed is born with one of three temperaments: spicy, medium, and mild. So far the scientific community has scoffed at my theory... the fools. I suspect a cover-up that the sauce industry does not want exposed. -Gennady

I'd like to draw your attention to another aspect of this illustration, notice how there are exactly thirteen breeds of sauce weasels in this scientific sketch? That number corresponds with the amount of letters in the name "Sauce Industry". Convenient isn't it? And what kind of relationship does the scientific community share with the sauce industry?
I will refrain from further comments, and let you be the judge to this conspiracy.

This scientific sketch is done by the talented Gennady Babichenko, whose domain can be found on deviantart.

My Deepest Apologies, Mr. Rousseau

Dear Mr. Jean-Jacques Rousseau,

This is a bit embarrassing, but I must admit, I am having a lot of trouble reading your acclaimed Discourse on Inequality this evening, to my dismay. Now this may be because I've yet to have a full night's sleep thus far this weekend but instead had short sporadic naps throughout the day, or maybe it's the thick opaque fog that is currently clouding my mind from watching the Naruto movie earlier. Viewing this movie has resulted in the unfortunate side-effect of a heavy loss of brain cells, which is detrimental to my literary processing abilities. I apologize with the utmost sincerity, and I vow never to watch said movies again. For now, I will do what Sandie hasn't done for over seven years, and head to bed, before 10:00pm. I will rise two hours prior to my usual set time and resume my reading efforts then. Thank you for your understanding.

Sandie