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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Seiber's InsaneJournal:
| Saturday, October 17th, 2009 | |
| 11:55 am | Simen tov and mazel tov, mazel tov and simen tov... I keep forgetting I've got this journal. Anyway, for those who haven't seen them yet over on my LJ, here are the pictures from my brother's bar mitzvah (and details from that are over here). A note here--no pictures were actually taken during the service. Due to Shabbat regulations I couldn't take them until after the sun went down and we did havdalah. Anything seen here is a recreation. I did also have some pictures of David doing the practice service but I can't find where I put them right now. ( After havdalah, of course, I couldn't keep my hands off the camera. ) |
| Monday, September 28th, 2009 | |
| 11:59 am | I just want to lay down and go comatose at this point. So the University of Pittsburgh? The one I was looking at hellishly closely and I talked to the guy on the phone and it was awesome? Turns out one of the application requirements is a year of college math, preferably in calculus. I've had two research method courses and one stat course. I found this out while casually looking over the site last night and my metabolism still hasn't recovered from the shock and horror and lack of sleep (love you, Price, for talking me through that). So the University of Chicago and the University of Maryland are looking like my best bets, with Urbana-Champaigne as a 'heck, why not' if my amount of lab courses are covered (which I'm not sure on) and Carnegie Mellon as my 'long shot' school, since all but Chicago seem to at least be doing some research vaguely in my department of interest. Still hurts to find this out so late in the game, I feel like a ridiculous fool. I'll pop over an email anyway, see if there's some sort of exemption or whatever I can get, but I doubt it. This would be on Yom Kippur, too. The whole 'day your name is inscribed and sealed in the book of life for the coming year' thing, while here I am frantically trying to do the same thing. I'm not fasting, I just felt too sick after last night, but I'm definitely repenting. So...yeah. Formally asking forgiveness from my friendslist for anything I did against you in the past year, purposefully or inadvertently. And God knows I've done a lot. Current Music: Stamp on the Ground - Zarla |
| Thursday, September 24th, 2009 | |
| 12:42 pm | I love my pic collection. So I'm at the Study Abroad fair now, yay! Apparently I'm supposed to just hang around and...I dunno, explain that I've been to England. I've got a small collection of Cambridge-relevant pictures stuck up on my laptop for demonstrative purposes to prove that England is awesome and everyone should totally go except the stupid people who should all go to France instead. The interesting part was collecting them. "Hm...well, got to include the history and art, I suppose." *puts up a few pictures of churches, a museum, and the Corpus Clock* "And the food, can't forget food!" *puts up the giant pot of tuna mac a la fish and the remains of a CB2 dessert* "I suppose they'll want to know about the natives as well." *puts up Mikki doing the cowboy thing and Rath wielding a battleaxe in a nunnery* "Some people might like wildlife." *puts up Kira's friend staring down a cow* "And then there's the culture." *puts up the vaguely embarrassed Morris dancers, a young guitarist from the hippyfair and the arguing kiltman in the city center, mourning lack of pictures from the burlesque party* "Students are important, of course." *puts up giddy skaters on Parker's Piece in full formal dress* "And recreational activities." *puts up people failing at punts and running into each other* The real problem in collecting them was how many of my photos are of graves, architecture, and Triad shenanigans. The former will scare people, the middle will bore people, and the latter will just be confusing. |
| Friday, September 18th, 2009 | |
| 4:03 pm | "Of course you did well. If there's one thing you do well, it's talking." -- Seiberdad Today I am, in all but officially, orally competent! ...not remotely what I meant. I did the Erikson presentation I've been spazzing about and while I doubt I did it in the fifteen minutes we were alloted the teacher didn't seem to care. Between me and the other girl presenting she said we'd "set the bar pretty high" for the rest of the class. Everyone else seemed to like it too when they went 'round and said what they liked about our presentation. I seemed to get points for not reading off any notes because I did actually practice some (and I knew the material because come on, Erikson's Stages of Psychosocial Development? That's kiddie stuff) and I managed to have eye contact and talk in a non-monotone manner. So if Dr. L liked it that much I'm almost certainly cruising for an A, and with my oral competancy taken care of I've pretty much fulfilled the last of my necessities for graduation. So huzzah! |
| Tuesday, September 8th, 2009 | |
| 1:08 pm | Aaaaagh. It is official. I don't know what I did or who I pissed off, but someone in the cosmic department of overlooking travelers really doesn't like me. Last night I started my car only to find that the battery was out. Dad charged it with his little chargy box and I was good to go. 7am this morning, he tried to start it and it worked fine. 8am this morning I try to start it and it doesn't work. So I charge up again and take myself down to AutoZone for a battery change, where my car is diagnosed with having a broken alternator. Much cursing ensues and Dad agrees to drive me up instead--I'd have said 'fuck it' and waited for the alternator to get repaired, but it would be missing Physics twice in two weeks. At 11am Dad and I are halfway to UNCA when my mom calls--apparently the local auto repair place looked at my car and said there was nothing wrong with it, it just needed a battery replaced. To Dad's credit he managed to keep the cursing confined to the phone and did not turn his wrath on me. For those not in the know, this is the second time my car's had problems right before I went off to school, leading to an emergency drive-up from one of my parents, and that's not counting all the other difficulties I've had when traveling any distance longer than a city's width. Something needs doing, I'm just not sure what. |
| Sunday, August 30th, 2009 | |
| 7:31 pm | Now get me some of those snap-snaps... So...I'm thinking about entering my first photo contest. No money, of course, but a little prestige would be nice and I've never done anything like this before. Even if I don't win I'll probably feel good for entering. However, I'm still stuck on which specific pic I want to use, so I figured I'd invest in the wisdom of LJ to help me decide. I've narrowed my choices down to a few, although if anyone wants to go back under my photography tag and make a recommendation they're welcome to do so. ( Pictures and requirements under the cut. ) |
| Thursday, August 20th, 2009 | |
| 3:44 pm | But what is the resonance frequency of Spock's heart? I have the best Physics of Sound and Music teacher ever.  I shot this picture while he was describing a Star Trek episode in which Kirk and Spock are running away from the bad guys down a mountain when they get an idea to use their communicators to hit the resonance frequency of the mountain and cause an avalanche. Except there's no way that could have worked because the communicators use radio frequencies, but it might work if the communicators had some ultrasound function and they turned them all the way up. He's not sure if they do but he wanted to find a way of making it work. I'm not sure if it's more or less awesome than him showing a clip of "Herbie Goes To Monte Carlo". |
| Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 | |
| 10:20 am | *wobbles* You know what I kind of feel like? A doll. Most of my body's about as flexible as it normally is, but I can't move my neck that far in any direction. Whenever I need to look down or to the side I have to pivot at the waist rather than turning my head, and to look at something closer means crouching and then bending over like I'm about to pray towards Mecca. I can move around the house well enough, but I've resigned myself to calling Mom or David over whenever I need to get more grape juice out of the fridge. That comes in alongside the fact that my vocal cords haven't gone back to normal yet. For those that haven't heard me speak, my voice is a bit deeper than the average woman's. Right now it's higher and softer, and my mom seems to find it more pleasant than my usual tone. Personally I think that it's also because I can't get loud enough to properly yell at anyone or get in a laugh more enthusiastic than a light chuckle without hurting myself. Although for some reason a fragile, soft-voiced (but not soft-headed) doll creature is trying to worm its way into my headspace and I have no idea what it is or what it does. I may have to ask Naise to come around and do something about it. Current Mood: sore Current Music: Brother's art lessons |
| Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 | |
| 12:33 pm | And so the saga draws to a close. That was a lot easier than I thought it would be. Anaesthetic worked like a charm, I was in the recovery room before I knew I was asleep. The procedure went exactly fine, and according to mom they took out something about the size of a golf ball. Woke up with my neck taped over and barely conscious, but not really in that much pain. The guy next to me wasn't doing quite as hot, I kept hearing him moaning and flailing about. One of the nurses had to deliver a gentle but firm "Sir, you're going to have to stop moving around or you're going to bleed to death." Apparently he later threatened to make another nurse his husband, or so I heard from said nurse when they wheeled my bed up to the eleventh floor Mom spent the night with me, although Dad stayed on until dinner. It helped to have someone running around for me, for the first night I could barely sit up on my own without anything jerking the wrong way. (Also one of the night nurses taking my blood to check calcium levels was an ex-Navy medic. With tattoos on his arms and everything. That was pretty cool.) They let me out around eleven thirty the next morning, after much bureaucratic nonsense-we could have left at seven, technically, but there was paperwork and tests and other such suchness and we weren't out until nearly noon. The pain meds appear to be doing their work, although I'm still sleeping rather fitfully. Not that I'm comfortable, mind you, swallowing and speaking is still a bit awkward and my voice has temporarily gone up about an octave due to the fact that the thyroid is (or was, I suppose) nestled up against the laryngeal nerves. Also I can't really raise my head too far up without it being painful, which makes most positions unfriendly to my spine. But it's not so bad. Not that it stops my granma from playing one-up in the pain and distress department, but that's granma. |
| Monday, August 3rd, 2009 | |
| 1:17 am | And here we go. Leaving the house in about six hours. This whole fasting business is annoying, they won't even let me have anything to drink except to take my meds with or some gum to calm my nerves. I'm not as freaked out as I was last night, just a bit twitchy in general at the anticipation. I have no idea how long it'll take me to recover or if I'll even be awake most of the time in the hospital. Mom's going to stay there with me all night so I'll at least have someone to talk to if I'm coherant. And some books for both of us. And chewing gum. All these things are necessary to life and happiness. However! My mom has a Blackberry. With internet and email and such things. So she's going to email ![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} alanahikarichan (at LJ) after I get out from surgery and Alana will post on whether I'm alive or not. ...it was Mom's idea, I guess she thinks the internet needs to know these things. *shrug* Wish me luck. |
| Saturday, August 1st, 2009 | |
| 3:35 pm | No bats, sadly. Pictures from my jaunt five minutes up the road to Cherokee Cave on one of the few days a year it's actually open. ( Down, down, down... ) |
| 12:29 am | Just to prove I'm not just using this to talk about my medical issues. One of the more obscure members of my headcast, mostly because I rarely get a chance to play him, is Skeletor. Not the cartoon guy (although he had his moments), but Skeletor as portrayed by Frank Langella in the Masters of the Universe live action movie. He's You may find clips of Skeletor being awesome here and here, with attempts at awesome that end with him falling down an unexplained and completely random pit here. As a bonus, you've just seen most of the best parts of Masters of the Universe (minus the bits featuring more Skeletor), so you don't actually have to watch the rest of the kind of movie which features He-Man driving a pink cadillac around a New Jersey suburb if you're not the sort of person who likes that flavor of ridiculous the way I do. |
| Thursday, July 30th, 2009 | |
| 10:27 pm | The exorcism of the alien egg sac. So. Visited the surgeon (also a nice guy, although he looks like he's a transatlantic commercial pilot) today for consulting and discussing the procedure. While there's only a visible bulge on the left side of my neck, a few nodules on the right side popped up on the ultrasound scans and the surgeon is also of the opinion that I should have the entire thyroid gland out just in case they are something to be worried about. I'm scheduled for noon on Monday, which is nice because I'll get a lot of recovery time before I go back to school. I show up and put on an embarrassing gown, they knock me out and make an incision right above my collarbone in order to do some stuff I wish I could watch but probably can't unless I do an out of body experience, and then I spend the night in a hospital bed while my mom plays with her Blackberry during all the times I'm not conscious enough to kick her out of the hospital to go get a sandwich or something and we go home the next morning. The recovery time varies but I should probably be mostly back in form after a few days, with the only real side effect being that my voice will be hoarse for a few days (unless I'm unlucky and something happens to my recurrent laryngeal nerves in which case I'll be hoarse for up to a year until it heals, but this is uncommon). I'm not horribly worried about anything going wrong. This particular surgeon's been slitting throats for thirty years and he says he's never had any complications. The only part that makes me uncomfortable is the fact that since I'm getting my entire gland taken out I'm going to be on thyroid hormone medicine for the rest of my life to compensate. While I'm already a lifelong Lamictal junky, there's a bit of a difference between "my brain will do weird and painful things if I stop taking this" and "I will get horribly sick if I stop taking this and probably will have trouble functioning". So...yeah. It's a weird thing to get hung up something so small, but it'll be the permanent part. Nothing for it, I suppose. I'll just have to stock up before I take any trips into wardrobes or swirly portals. |
| Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 | |
| 2:43 pm | The saga of the alien egg sac continues! After intense clerical failure from my GP's former (for obvious reasons) nurse we FINALLY got in to see the endocrinologist. He seemed a decent sort and also recommended surgery, both for my left side and for the multiple smaller (as in only detectable by ultrasound) egg sacs on my right side. He thinks it'll be a total or near-total thyroidectomy, which will most likely involve me having to start taking thyroid hormones as well to compensate for what I'm losing. Since I'm close to hypothyroidic as it is, it might be beneficial. We're going in to see the surgeon on Thursday, because the endocrinologist sat on him over the phone and convinced him to get me in quick, and then ideally I can have my throat slit at some point next week before I have to go back to school. Huzzah! |
| Tuesday, July 21st, 2009 | |
| 7:57 pm | *plays banjo* Ways You Know You Are Back In Tennessee The car repair place waiting room has a Bible sitting next to the old magazines. You mistake a church for a Kroger supermarket and are only convinced otherwise by an easily-missed cross on the window. Palm-sized spiders crawling up the opposite wall while you're taking a shower are not terrifying invaders of personal space but are merely immigrants to the group of other spiders already congregating in webs on your ceiling. ALSO: Is The Fear supposed to be aggressively bisexual? All his fanart makes him out to be such, but I can never tell with MGS fandom. Current Music: Lordi |
| Monday, July 20th, 2009 | |
| 10:28 am | Announcings Oi, Rath? Could you email me your parents' address? I want to send them a card for letting me stay at their house a few weeks ago. |
| Friday, July 17th, 2009 | |
| 6:57 pm | Hooray booze! You know something awesome about being 21? Your mom makes you mixed drinks to have with dinner. *sips rum and coke daintily* |
| Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 | |
| 2:22 pm | The good news: I'm not falling apart. A little twitchy due to being unable to just walk out of the house and wander as I please through the city, but I'll live. I think being back at my parents' house is messing with me the way it usually does, where I get all oversensitive and feel boxed in and surrounded by chaos. No major arguments with my parents as of yet, however, which is another thing I consider to be a self-accomplishment, and I think my mom and I are going out for pedicures tomorrow. Might even get some of my writing ability back, I'm flat-out exhausted on a creative front these days. The bad news: Everything else is falling apart. This house is about eighteen years old all over, since we had to get it built from the ground up after the fire. Therefore, things need replacing. Mom's already nosing around for new countertops because the tiles have uncleanable concrete between them and are made of fail, and now the dishwasher's gone and died so we're all washing up by hand now. The alien egg sac news: After a lot of Mom-nudging my GP Dr. N (and I do mean a lot, she's been doing it since late June) to call the endocrinologist, I've finally got an appointment for the 28th. Ideally this means that I can get the surgery before I leave for UNCA, but mom thinks not. So...in that case the options are to get it done during fall break in October or get it done in Asheville, both options I am not completely happy with. This thing's still growing, and I'd like to not have to drive myself back from the hospital. |
| Monday, July 13th, 2009 | |
| 9:42 am | All wrong. My feet keep feeling around for the headboard that this bed doesn't have. I think there's some portion of my brain that's still under the impression that this is a vacation and I'll be going home to Cambridge soon enough. I'm trying to settle down for the evening and it all feels intensely wrong, like I shouldn't be here. The room's too big, the headboard's gone, the noises and the lighting aren't right and I don't have my window. Even the air feels wrong, too humid outside and air conditioning on inside so it's cold on purpose rather than just because of cold air outside. I said I'd keep it together this summer and I'm going to keep it together. I just didn't expect it had gotten this deep into my bones. |
| Sunday, July 12th, 2009 | |
| 9:00 pm | If I'm being toyed with by a god, he's definitely one who has authority over travelers. I'm feeling surprisingly good this morning. A bit twitchy and dizzy due to the shifted schedule of my medicating combined with the lack of sleep, but that should clear itself up by the afternoon if nothing horrible happens to set me off. It probably has something to do with finally having some decent sleep (I woke up after five hours, but it counts) and eating the first proper meal I've had in nearly thirty hours (although, guys? You have spiffy hotel rooms, I'd think you could spring for at least free muffins rather than just sticking a restaurant on your back end, even if it is awesome enough to almost have the same name as the one in the hotel in Hotel Dusk). I was so rushed getting onto the plane that I had nothing to eat between breakfast and airplane dinner, and then nothing after that until a sandwich around ten o'clock EST. On the other hand it might be the calm after the storm effect, that thing you get after a harrowing experience when you finally get to lay down on a soft bed, access your beloved internet, and simply relax without obligation for the next few hours before heading off to the airport again. I was pretty much in a panicked daze from the point where we got caught in traffic between Cambridge and Stratford and I'm only really cooling down now. Actually, it wasn't until breakfast that it really hit me exactly where I was and what was going on. I'm sitting in a hotel, hundreds of miles away from anyone I know or can contact and thousands of miles away from my starting point, having dragged myself here across two state borders with the aid of several buses while bearing a full backpack and two overstuffed pieces of luggage, one of which has a broken handle. And I got here on my own without breaking down or crying at any point along the way at the confusion or mislaid plans that seem to dog my every step when I travel. It's...pretty damn impressive by my standards and I don't think I could have done it a year ago. Lost time and money aside this is actually kind of encouraging. And for record-keeping purposes, I'm just going to make a tally of how many vehicles it took to get here. Bus from Cambridge Plane to JFK, in place of plane to Newark Bus from JFK to Grand Central Station Bus from Grand Central to Newark Airport Airtrain from Terminal B of Newark Airport to P4 (okay, so the airtrain is pretty cool) Hotel shuttle to Wyndham Garden Hotel Hoping everything goes well, it will be followed by: Hotel shuttle to Newark Airpot Airtrain to check-in Airtrain to appropriate terminal Plane to Charlotte Plane to Knoxville Parent-driven car to parents' house. Dang. Current Mood: content Current Music: Some dudes outside. |