Saturday, December 15, 2012

THE HOBBIT.

if you're as smart as you look, you know what this post is going to be about.

i'm having a lot of hobbit feels. a lot. and by a lot i mean my entire tumblr right now is nothing but the hobbit and i want to climb richard armitage's lonely mountain. if you know what i mean.

i stole that line from a witty person on tumblr. i never would've come up with that myself.

oh, here's my warning.

THIS IS GOING TO BE NOTHING BUT SPOILERS AND STUFF BUT YOU SHOULD READ IT ANYWAY BECAUSE IT'S MOSTLY JUST ME SHARING MY INTENSE FEELINGS ABOUT LORD OF THE RINGS AND I DON'T THINK I'LL RUIN TOO MUCH OF ANYTHING AND I NEED TO LEARN TO TURN OFF MY CAPSLOCK.

right. like, i don't think i'll actually spoil anything? except maybe like, the basic premise of the movie?

maybe. let's begin.

so this actually begins with me laying around in my room watching breaking bad and drinking wine alone in my room on a thursday night, because we all know that the best time to drink is alone in your room on a thursday night. this is like, the fourth time i've done this and i feel like it's a sure sign of alcoholism.

so walter from breaking bad was blowing up some bad guys and cooking some awesome crystal and getting sick from chemotherapy and i was like, man, what if my dad was a meth cooker like walter and then jacob (the boyfriend not the best friend) was like, SURPRISE IT'S ELEVEN AND YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS!

sometime over the summer.

me: the hobbit comes out in december!
jacob: we're seeing it at midnight!
me: what if i have an exam on friday morning? it's finals week.
jacob: uh. don't care.
me: but-
jacob: DID YOU HEAR ME, WOMAN?

he didn't say that last line. but we were going to the hobbit at midnight no matter what.

we bought our hobbit tickets in the same trip that bought me the wine that got me through the first season of breaking bad without vomiting. because a guy literally melts through pinkman's ceiling at one point and i really think that alcohol was the only thing that got me through it.

so at eleven thirty we head over to my car, slipping in the lovely snow that alma has and i'm incredibly excited. like, i get excited about everything.

when i say i get excited, i mean i get excited. i twitch. i tremble. i jump. i wring my hands. i flail my arms. i make inhuman noises. i scream and make highpitched whistling sounds.

i. cannot. control. excitement. it's a problem.

so i'm driving and squealing and shaking and jacob is just sitting in the passenger seat like, whatever, man. and i'm like, HOW ARE YOU NOT EXCITED and he's like, yo i'm totally excited and i'm like, YOU ARE NOT PHYSICALLY SHAKING ENOUGH TO BE EXCITED! and then the rest of the ride i yelled HOBBIT HOBBIT HOBBIT and flailed my arms until jacob was like, emily hold onto the steering wheel, you're driving a car.

so we get to alma's little theatre and who's it full of?

jacob's PMA brothers.

we take our seats. nobody rips our tickets, so technically we could've snuck in, but we're honest, decent people. the theatre is PACKED with alma students. we find a spot for two between a huge throng of jacob's brothers and some of their friends who are girls (not to say that they don't have girlfriends.) and we have half an hour to wait. i'm practically having a seizure i'm so excited, which is saying something, because i actually have seizures in real life.

and then, after an agonizing wait in which jacob and i see that there are an average of two RAs per building staff in the theatre, the movie starts and i'm about to pee my pants.

my first reaction is that ian holm's face is a lot fatter than it is in the fellowship of the ring and i'm trying not to let it bother me. and then frodo shows up and i'm like, well that's weird, i'm so used to him in that outfit he wore ALL THREE MOVIES and then frodo's like, hey bilbo, i'm going to go wait for gandalf in the woods and surprise him!

and then my heart melted into a gigantic puddle of feels from the fellowship.

i should back up. i skipped the part about the dwarf kingdom that got demolished by a dragon that you never actually see. which was really crafty on peter jackson's part.

anyway, ian holm transforms into martin freeman and of course, i fangirled really hard. here's a conversation to help you understand.

me: MARTIN FREEMAN IS PLAYING BILBO! EEEE!
my dad: who?
me: martin freeman, daddy!
my dad: who's that?
me: he plays dr. john watson in sherlock!
my mom: elementary?
me: NO. SHERLOCK. THE BRITISH TV SHOW.
my parents: oh. right. you watch british TV because you want to be british.
me: MARTIN FREEEEMAN

so of course, he's adorable as a hobbit. and dwarves start showing up and they're making a mess and bilbo's doing exactly what i do in any situation: panic.

and then it gets quiet and there's a knock on the door and gandalf whispers, "he is here."

who is here?! i can't figure out who's here. i'm excited. who's at bilbo's house?!

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL DWARF ON THE FACE OF THE PLANET.

UNFFFFFFFF.
that would be thorin oakenshield. or thorin son of thrain. that's so much fun to say out loud. thorin son of thrain.

THORIN.

thorin is kingly. he has a deep voice. he's a badass warrior. and he can sing.

so the whole movie i'm like, i'm attracted to a dwarf. dwarves aren't supposed to be pretty. but oh my GOD do i want this dwarf. ahhh is this normal?!

tumblr alerted me that yes, it is normal. i feel better about being attracted to a dwarf now.

so the whole gist of the movie is that thorin, twelve other dwarves, gandalf and bilbo set out to reclaim the kingdom that was overtaken by the nasty dragon. it's an adventure story! hooray!

bilbo has no idea what he's doing. at one point he falls into a crevice and the dwarves are like, welp, he's dead, let's move on. he falls off a cliff at one point and thorin is like, ugh, gotta save your ass now, stupid hobbit in the middle of a thunderstorm. he gets sneezed on by a mountain troll and he has absolutely no idea how to wield his sword.

the dwarves, on the other hand, are like, badass fighters. thorin is the best of them all, having defeated this giant scary orc named azog. i was looking at azog and i was like, man, he really looks like the tree fawn in pan's labyrinth and then in the credits it was like, guillermo del toro and i was like, WHAT UP. I WAS RIGHT.

but anyway, azog is this big ass pale orc that's like, gigantic and mean and speaks an ugly language and rides a huge white warg and he's like, i killed thorin's dad and his grandpa, i want thorin's head so we're going to hunt them the whole movie because i just really hate thorin's family and thorin cut off my arm and that makes me sad inside.

halfway through the movie there's a huge repulsive giant goblin and i just wanted to vomit every time i looked at him. he's absolutely disgusting.

and caves! the dwarves are always going into caves! and bad things happen when they go into caves and halfway through the movie i was like, yo, thorin, another cave? not a good idea, bro.

and then there's gollum. bilbo falls into a crevice and all the dwarves are like, we can't find bilbo but that's okay because we're being attacked by these crazy goblins and we're going to DIE and bilbo is like, what's around this corner?! AND IT'S GOLLUM FUGGIN' BEATING A GOBLIN TO DEATH AND EATING IT WITH HIS BARE HANDS.

oh, and then gollum appears out of nowhere and his eyes GLOW IN THE DARK and he spends like, ten minutes discussing ways to eat bilbo and bilbo is like, i am about to be eaten by a scrawny thing that speaks in this awkward third person and who the hell is precious?

and then we all know that bilbo takes the ring. when gollum found out that bilbo had the ring, i have never been more terrified for a movie character in my entire life.

eventually azog made another appearance and actually spoke english, so that was cool. but then all the dwarves were hanging over a cliff by a tree and azog was like, BRING ME THORIN'S HEAD and i was like, NOOOOO THORIN MY EYE CANDY and there was some legit amount of time that i thought that thorin was dead and i may or may not have cried, which really means that i did.

AND RADAGAST.

picture an old man completely high out of his mind and keeping a bird's nest in his hat.

that's radagast.

he also has a wooden sleigh drawn by giant talking rabbits. he's like... santa of the forest. he also has pet hedgehogs. he might be my spirit animal.

so we all know that the hobbit is being made into three movies, and the first one was two hours and fifty minutes long. some of it was boring and i almost fell asleep, but i was seeing it at midnight, to be fair. even though it's a long movie, there's still two more, and we all know what that means.

it ended. rather abruptly.

so all the dwarves are on a rock and thorin is like, hey bilbo, you're actually not a worthless stupid hobbit and then it's like

DIRECTED BY PETER JACKSON

and i was like, NOOOOOOOO IT CAN'T BE OVER

me: WHAT. NO. 
jacob: let's go, i have a splitting headache, it's three in the morning.
me: I NEED MORE
jacob: please, let's just leave
me: NOOOO IT CAN'T END LIKE THAT

and i legitimately cried. i hugged jacob around the middle and sobbed into his shirt for a good two minutes before he finally dragged me out of the theatre and made me drive back to campus.

in short, i loved the hobbit. it was awesome. it gave me so many feels. 

i posted "i never thought i could be incredibly attracted to a dwarf" on tumblr and it has like, forty notes, which is awesome. tumblr famous!

i want to go see again. of course, i'm saving my money, so i'm not going to see it like, eighteen times like i did with spiderman and the avengers. but now that i'm home, i will make sure that my parents go see it with me.

i'll leave you with this.


that's right, bilbo. you go on your adventure.

AND DON'T DIE IN THE LAST MOVIE, I WON'T BE ABLE TO HANDLE THAT.

Thursday, December 6, 2012

that fantastic day i had wires sticking out of my head. during hell week.

aaaaand we're live at procrastination station!

aka my carrel that's not really my carrel. i'm treating it like it is my own. which means i left a huge pile of my books there during lunch where i shouldn't have had those two cups of dr. pepper.

it's the week before finals, which brings to mind my list of LAST year's week before finals when i was furiously writing a five page paper in spanish.

right now i'm writing a five page paper in chicago style formatting, which is almost as painful.

because it's the week before finals, i obviously had to blog about it for student life, and you can find that here.

so here's a list, because all of my blogs have a list.

THINGS EMILY SHOULD BE DOING.

1. finishing her five page paper on hemophilia, rasputin, and the fall of the romanovs.
2. writing her seven page paper on beowulf.

both of these papers are due tomorrow. in the morning.

THINGS EMILY IS DOING.

1. drinking a really delicious vitamin water.
2. blogging. obviously.
3. wearing a cute dress.
4. having too much fun with her iphone.
5. listening to fun. their old album. before they were cool.

here's another list of acceptable things to do during the week before finals, and it will actually get to the point of this blog.

ACCEPTABLE THINGS TO DO DURING THE WEEK BEFORE FINALS.

1. drink wine alone in your room and cry.
2. watch spiderman too many times and want to marry andrew garfield.
3. make your residents goodie bags and wish you had an RA to make one for you but you can't because you're the RA and you're afraid of eating all the candy yourself alone in your room.
4. take showers three times a day and cry in them.
5. have awkward wires sticking out of your head.

number five is the premise of this blog.

right. so we all know the routine of "emily's been having seizures but they're not actually seizures we don't think but seizure is so much easier to say than convulsions, so emily's been having seizures and nobody knows why", right? of course we do.

so my bloodwork is clean, i don't have lupus or AIDS or some scary autoimmune disease, so what's the next step?

a 24 hour EEG, of course.

an EEG is where they hook wires up all of your head and watch your brainwaves. i had one in the hospital, but it was only for an hour. this was for twenty-four.

i had specific instructions i had to follow before the procedure, which happened on tuesday, the day that i was planning on being ultra productive and writing at least one of my two papers that's due tomorrow morning. instead i slept in, was extremely nervous, and spent a lot of lunch time whimpering. instructions: i wasn't allowed to put anything weird in my hair, such as hairspray. or bows.

i wear hairspray every single day of my life. i also wear a bow every single day of my life.

it was awkward.

i drove to mount pleasant where i didn't have quite as much gas as i thought, and i found my neurologist's office, which is in the middle of nowhere but down the street from target. i was wearing a comfortable t-shirt like they instructed and my hair was woefully undone and bow-less. i brought my careworn copy of the order of the phoenix, i announced my presence, and read about harry putting his terribly aching hand in a bowl of essence of murtlap tentacles.

sounds spiffy.

every single person in the waiting room of my neurologist's office was a sad, overweight, older woman. apparently spry young college girls don't often see my neurologist.

a nice lady took me back into a special room with a special chair with a special towel on it. she told me her name, but i quickly forgot it, which made me feel bad, because she was super nice and we spent the next two hours together bonding.

have you ever had somebody draw on you with crayon? it doesn't show up unless you really dig that crayon in there.

i hope you haven't had somebody do this to you. it's really painful.

so this nice lady is taking this marker and she's rubbing it hard into my head, and it feels like she's trying to draw on me with crayon. she's parting my hair in different directions and really scrubbing it in there, and i figure if we're going to be here for a while, i might as well tell her half of my life story, so i start talking. then she's sticking glue over the spots that she's marked, including the giant red line going right down the middle of my forehead to my nose.

then she starts to tell me about this stuff called colodian. i'm not sure if it's spelled like that, but it's pronounced "cul-load-eon" so i figure i'll just spell it colodian and deal with the consequences of misspellings.

it smells horrible. she's putting it all over my scalp and in my hair. we're talking about how shitty the education system is and why i want to be a teacher and live in england, all that jazz. the colodian is cold. smelly. unhappy. my hair is sticking up in odd places. this lady is super nice and letting me talk her ear off.

then she's telling me that the colodian is this extra special glue so that the electrodes won't fall off my head when i'm having a seizure or when i'm sleeping. it takes forever to dry, so she's going to dry each electrode site with an air compressor.

it was a like a loud, scary dental instrument that puffed freezing air at my head. totally normal stuff.

the whole ordeal of sticking twenty-eight wires to my head with scary glue and an air compressor took two hours. and it wasn't done after that.

all twenty-eight wires, which were easter colored (pink, blue, purple, yellow, green) came together at the back of my neck, where they were funneled into an awkward fabric tube. that tube then ran into a heart monitor, which was held onto me by a shoulder harness. to keep the shoulder harness on, it connected to  a strap that went around my waist.

basically, i was wearing a giant seatbelt/guitar strap covered in wires.

after that, a cord leading from the heart monitor attached to the brainwave monitor, which was about the size of a video camera, like, the old ones from the nineties. THAT was put in a puffy fanny pack that sat around my hips.

all the cool kids wear fanny packs.

i was less than thrilled, but i figured hey, i've been through a lot worse than walking around campus with wires sticking out of my head and an awkward shoulder harness and a fanny pack. i was pretty chillax about the whole thing. the lady who stuck all the wires to my head and set me up in my straps told me that i was the most positive person she'd ever encountered that had a 24 hour EEG. she said that most people hid in their houses and didn't come out.

well, i have a life. and classes. and sorority sisters and stuff. i can't hide in my room. i have shit to do.

she gave me the basic rules of the EEG.

1. no showering.
2. no taking off any of the harnesses.
3. don't wear hats that are too tight.
4. no chewing gum or having hard candy.
5. no making out with the boyfriend. (honestly. this was a thing.)
6. if you have a seizure, press the button on the brain recorder.
7. fill out your event diary.

the event diary was pretty basic. i ate lunch at noon. i had a seizure at seven. i took my antidepressants at midnight. i took a nap at two.

basic stuff.

when i left the office with my head covered in wires and my shoulder harness and fanny pack secure, i distinctly heard the nice lady say to the nurse, "poor girl."

i'm not poor. i just have seizures and stuff.

of course, i have to have a picture of my harness, fanny pack, and a single wire sticking out of my hair.

holy 24 EEG, batman!

doesn't look too bad, right? that's because you can't see the gigantic electrodes on my forehead that are covered in gauze and the eighteen wires that are tucked neatly behind my ears.

it's also astonishing my large my nose ring is. i should probably downgrade.

it was weird, but i was excited to have a seizure, because it meant that i could push the happy button and then they'd actually know something about why i'm having awkward convulsions. so when i had a convulsion at midnight, i was like, PRAISE THE GOOD LORD I'M HAVING A CONVULSION and i pressed the happy button and when it was over, i fell asleep. which was awkward with the wires, the fanny pack, and the shoulder harness and heart montior.

so the next day i wake up for my eight thirty class and my hair is a hot mess. i have about twenty alfalfas chillin' on the top of my head. my bangs no longer have the capacity to hide the gigantic electrodes pasted to my forehead. and those wire bundles behind my ears have been freed and are sticking out and making a huge halo around my head. i'm not allowed to brush my hair or get it wet. i don't have a suitable hat.

i venture out into the real world wearing a shirt that i wore the day before and then slept in with my hair and my electrodes a hot mess. it was pretty glorious.

i wish i had taken a picture of the extraordinary bad hair day. i feel like it tops most of the bad hair days you've ever had. unless you woke up one day with the biggest afro in the world, and if you did that, then you're not having a bad hair day, you're just awesome.

finally, after three classes and a whole bunch of people staring at me and feeling gross, i drove like a maniac back to the office, where another lady that was nowhere near as nice started to take off all twenty-eight electrodes and all of the wires. she told me that colodian remover wasn't as smelly as colodian, but she lied.

that shit was disgusting.

it was also runny. it ran all down the sides of my face and she had to cover my eyes in a washcloth to prevent it from getting in my eyes. 

when i was electrode free, she patted my hair down with a wet towel and collected my event diary and told me i'd get my results back in january. i touched my hair, which was now spiked in strange directions. it was slimy. very slimy.

the whole drive back to alma, the terrible smell of the colodian remover filled up my car and i was extremely unhappy.

i got back to campus at five o'clock and the first thing i did was lock my door and jump in the shower. i could feel glue all over my head and my scalp and i scrubbed and scrubbed. did you know that you get can get sore behind your ears? it gets very tender there, especially when you scrape glue out from behind there with your fingernails. 

i washed my hair three times. when i dried my hair and went to go do it before dinner, i still found gigantic chunks of glue hiding all over my scalp. 

i spent most of my night class finding glue deposits with my hands and pulling it out. soon i was covered in little pieces of glue, which got all over my sweatshirt and my desk. one of my sisters asked me if it was snowing outside and i had gotten it in my hair.

nah, just pulling glue out of my hair.

i washed my hair twice this morning. i am still pulling glue out of my hair.

every girl's dream, especially during the week before finals, is to have wires glued to her head, be unable to wear cute hats to cover it up, and then be covered in sticky smelling goop that doesn't actually do its job when you finally get in the shower to get clean. i mean, this has to be everybody's dream.

right? right?

it certainly wasn't mine.

now you know a little bit of something about my adventurous life with my newfound convulsions and my week before finals.

until then, i get back to this.


so. much. rasputin.

FINALS WEEK, KIDS. LET'S DO THIS.