There's no point in living if you can't feel the life

I'm the PR Committee Chair for the "Vagina Monologues" being performed at my school, and I finally finished the poster design.

What do you think?

( The picture is rather large... )

The BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. I've read 32, how bout you?

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'X' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Add a '-' to those you did not love at all.
5) Tally your total number of Xs at the bottom.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X+
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X+
6 The Bible X+
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X+
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare X+
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X+
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X+
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger*
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy*
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X+
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky*
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame*
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy*
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens*
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X+
34 Emma - Jane Austen*
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X+
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini*
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden*
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X+
41 Animal Farm - George Orwel X+
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery X
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood *
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan*
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert X
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens*
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X+
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold X
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas*
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding X
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker*
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray*
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X+
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker*
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert*
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Album
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle*
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X+
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas*
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X+
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo*

If you're tagged in this note, you should tag 25 of your closest friends to find out 25 new things about them you may have never known!

1. I drink tap water and think it's silly to buy bottled water when you have perfectly good water coming out of your faucet.
2. I rarely put lotion on my skin. Mostly out of laziness.
3. The organic movement makes me angry only because those who follow it consider themselves elite to those who don't. I'll eat whatever I damn please, be it riddled with pesticides or otherwise!
4. When I was 4 my parents had a dinner party and I pooped in my toy box. They discovered it a day later.
5. My favorite food is a tie between grilled cheese sandwiches and macaroni and cheese. This has remained unchanged ever since I can remember.
6. I think nerdy guys are sexy.
7. I still listen to 90s pop before going out on Saturday nights.
8. I can crack my wrists on command. It's pretty gross, and probably not the best for my joints.
9. Whenever I think about yelling "I hate you!" to my parents when I was really little and in a fight, I get extremely upset because it's so completely untrue. I love my parents more then I love myself.
10. I still pick my nose. Sometimes a tissue just doesn't give me the same satisfaction.
11. I got my period for the first time on a 8-hour car ride back from visiting my cousins in Irvine. I remember getting the worst cramps EVER and thinking I needed Pepto-Bismal because I thought it was a bad stomach ache.
12. My fondest memory is spending 2 weeks of the summer in North Carolina with my entire family as a child. The water was warm, the beach was peaceful, and the memories are timeless. I hope to return to Figure Eight Island someday with my children. I even lost my first tooth there! I was terrified the tooth fairy wouldn't find me since I was so far away from home. She found me =)
13. I don't like fish or any type of seafood. I attribute this to when I was in my mom's womb. She usually loves seafood, but when she was pregnant with me the thought of it made her queasy. I think this impacted my taste because I HATE it even after trying it time and time again.
14. I peed outside the economics lab during finals week last semester. I didn't want to go all the way to the bathroom in the nearest dorm and I REALLY had to go so I popped a squat right outside the door. Thank GOD no one saw.
15. I call my brother a lot, more than I call home.
16. I believe in psychics and mediums, but am unwilling to pay such a high price for a reading.
17. At summer camp one year I laughed so hard I peed myself and had to sneak away from campfire to change my pants. No one ever found out!
18. I can hold my bladder longer then anyone I've ever met. I must have a bladder of steel or something because the thing is SOLID.
19. I can only fall asleep on my side in the fetal position with a pillow between my knees.
20. I dream every single night and can usually remember them the next morning.
21. When I was in 3rd grade I had warts all over my hands and knees. I took this disgusting tasting medicine for 3 months and all of a sudden one day they all vanished.
22. I've always secretly wanted to shave my head and just wear a different wig each day. I will probably NEVER do this but the thought of it is intriguing.
23. My parents' nickname for me is "Mud Hen." Never really understood why, but I still think it's hilarious.
24. My feet are gross and I hate them.
25. The best part about growing up where I did was being able to go over to my neighbor's house everyday to play with Kirsten and Kelsey. They moved when I was 10 and it sucked. I'm still friends with Kirsten to this day!

Another year past. Thank FREAKING God.

Everyone keeps saying "This is the worst Christmas ever!" because of the recession and such, but I have to disagree. The worst Christmas has GOT to be during the Revolutionary War when Washington attacked the English Christmas morning. THAT had to suck balls.



So take it in context- at least you're not being surprise attacked by colonialists.

Merry Christmas!

Lots of names are being tossed around as President Elect Obama chooses who he wants in his cabinet and White House staff, but every single one is a Democrat. What happened to including both parties? What happened to a bipartisan cabinet and trying to cross party lines in order to find compromise? I can only hope we see this in the coming weeks, because an entirely left-wing cabinet doesn't leave much room for other opinions. We don't find solutions by adhering to the extremes- moderation is the key.

Come on, Obama, I believe in you. Please please PLEASE choose your advisors and cabinet members wisely and not based on your own personal Democratic opinions. Represent AMERICA! ALL OF IT! Not just the coasts....

Love it. Already have it pre-ordered (although it's easy to illegally download, so that'll do until the actual album comes out).

You should buy it. Best song on the album- "If You Seek Amy"


That is all. Nothing special, just saying ;)

I'm so glad SOMEONE has the courage to say what has to be said. People are blaming the "free market" for our current economic woes, when it was actually the government INVOLVEMENT with lending money via the Federal Reserve that buried the hatchet. Here is an email I received (as did many Ron Paul supporters) which is in response to the President's take on the crisis. I hope you take the time to read it, because he makes some very compelling arguments, most of which I personally agree with.

( FREEDOM and JUSTICE for all )

These are my new obsession

Former NASA astronaut and moon-walker Dr. Edgar Mitchell — a veteran of the Apollo 14 mission — claims aliens exist.

He says extraterrestrials have visited Earth on several occasions — but the alien contact has been repeatedly covered up by governments for six decades.

Mitchell, 77, said during a radio interview in Birmingham, England, that sources at NASA who had had contact with aliens described the beings as "little people who look strange to us."

He said supposedly real-life ET's were similar to the traditional image of a "small gray" — short, slight frame, large eyes and large head.

Mitchell also claimed human technology is "not nearly as sophisticated" as the aliens' and "had they been hostile," he warned "we would be been gone by now."

source

Tommy Girl is going to flip a shit

Last night our neighbors down the street had their cars broken into. My brother also had his wallet stolen and the people around the block had THEIR cars broken into. I can't help but feel guilty for all of this because it was my party a few weeks ago that sparked all this criminal activity. The worst part about it is that I know the thieves at MY party were invited by someone who knows MY friends.

How fucking low can you go? You can't work hard enough to buy your own stuff so you have to go steal someone else's? Pathetic. Are you too stupid to get a good job and make your own money? Any retard on the street can steal a wallet. Enjoy a life of mediocrity, assholes.

Thanks to the recent happenings, the Los Altos police as well as the county sheriff will be running extra patrols in our neighborhood, probably for the rest of the year. They realize that we are specifically being targetted, and they look forward to catching the scum that are doing this to our neighborhood.

I understand if you have a problem with me, you steal from me. Fine, I can't say I agree with it but at least I'm the only one affected. But the people you stole from are a good family with young kids. They don't deserve this. Don't bring whatever beef you have with me or my brother out to an innocent family. That's disgusting.

All I can say is that you should steer clear of my neighborhood. Everyone is watching and I know of a few families who are now installing security cameras (including my own). You will be caught, but you better PRAY it's not by me.

.... I think I like McCain better. I'm ignoring the rhetoric and superficial image and basing this opinion on their policies. McCain is an advocate for an individual's rights and is pushing for a smaller, less intrusive overall government.

Plus, Obama's economic policies are extremely lacking. He wants to raise minimum wage, increase unemployment benefits, AND increase taxes. Major inflation and deficits, much? As an economics major, I think this policy would essentially be financial suicide. If minimum wage increases, fewer businesses would be willing to hire workers. Unemployment would rise due to the slower pace of new jobs so more people will register for unemployment. They THEN become financial burdens to the federal government and all those extra benefits will need to get funded from SOMEWHERE. Any guesses as to where he's planning on getting that money? That's right. YOU. He covers this up by claiming he's going to give tax rebates to middle class families, which is all fine and good until you realize that he's taking more of their money in federal income taxes anyways, so it's more of a cover than anything else. He also doesn't want senior citizens making less than $50,000 per year to pay ANY income tax. By doing so, he would need to make up for that loss of revenue somewhere else. Any guesses as to where that extra money is coming from? That's right, YOU!

So while his policies seem socially progressive and moral on the outside, once you dig beneath the surface you see how flawed they truly are. It begs one to ask: "Where's the beef?" Obama's utopian view of how America will be saddens me, not because I don't wish America could be like that, but because it won't be like that under his policies. Numbers don't lie, sweethearts.


Behind his inspirational speeches and message of hope, there's really not that much to back it up. As much as I like the guy, I'm just not sure I would feel comfortable voting for him.



And that's my political shbeal for today.

It's widely known that China has been in overhaul preparing for the Olympics next month, but we never seem to focus on the individual citizens doing their part to get ready for the festivities.

Also preparing was Dr. Wei Sheng, the Chinese man who holds the Guinness Book record of sticking 1,790 needles in his head at one time. In June he stuck himself with 2,008 pins in the Olympic design and colors. [Daily Telegraph (London), 6-3-08]

Now THERE'S a Patriot! No, honestly I had no idea he held the record. I didn't know there WAS a record. In fact I don't think he deserves the title of record holder at all. Dethrone him! Off with his head (needles and all)!

There's only one other person in the world who has had more needles stuck in them and that person is AMY WINEHOUSE. Someone should congradulate her. Just don't get too close.... you'll be high for a month.

HIGHER CO2 LEVELS MAY BE GOOD FOR PLANTS

The dangerous rise in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere may be troubling scientists and world leaders but it could prove to be a boon for plants, German researchers said Tuesday.

Increasing exposure to carbon dioxide appears to boost crop yields, Hans-Joachim Weigel of the Johann Heinrich von Thuenen Institute for rural areas, forestry and fisheries in the central city of Brunswick told AFP.

"Output increased by about 10 percent for barley, beets and wheat" when the plants were subjected to higher levels of carbon dioxide, Weigel said.

The Thuenen Institute, which has been monitoring the phenomenon in fields since 1999, trains CO2 jets on the plants so the gas reaches 550 parts per million in the air around them -- the level expected in the atmosphere by 2050.

Weigel said the studies have indicated that while greater CO2 exposure appears to spur growth, it can also undermine the quality of the produce.

He said the next step in the study would be to evaluate the effect of higher temperatures on plant growth -- which scientists cite as another consequence of higher CO2 emissions in the atmosphere.

Weigel said that while the institute's findings may prove surprising to some, they are not intended to undermine the drive to slash CO2 emissions.

"This research is not intended as an argument for doing nothing to curb the rise of CO2 levels," he said. "It is to find out what the effects would be."

Other studies have presented a more mixed picture about the impact of higher CO2 levels on plants, and there is uncertainty about its effects on soil fertility and which plants benefit most from more CO2.




Gotta love those German scientists

My birth date: March 29, 1988

Deer: You are a person who follows your own instincts and feelings -- which may mean doing what you want to do, when you want to. You have no hesitation about speaking your mind on controversial subjects, and you are generally quite knowledgeable about such matters. Mentally, you combine a powerful intuition with good reasoning abilities and are not easily convinced or swayed from your intellectual positions. To others, you appear dominating, but you don't really want to dominate. You simply know what you know well and tend to be quite inflexible at times.

Deer is a sign of participation in the community. Those born under this day-sign are often deeply involved with family traditions, and in some cases, socio-political traditions. Your need for the security of close relationships with others is at the base of this tendency. Partnership appeals to you, and yet you have a difficult time of it because your need for freedom creates conflicts and leads to unconventional relationships.

Your strong instincts come into play when you sense that your "territory" is being invaded. You have concern for your personal space, as well as that of the community you are a part of, and if you feel someone or something is degrading your environment, you will act immediately. In extreme cases, this instinctive concern of yours could lead you into power struggles and "turf-wars."

You are a very sensual person. On one level, food and eating are probably very important to you. Your aesthetic sensibilities are usually strong and you may be an artist, musician, poet or writer, or at least be interested in the arts. You have a strong sense of rhythm and enjoy dancing and other sensual body movements, including sex, for example. In fact, your strong sex drive may be part of your problem in maintaining stable relationships.

You are really a very complex person who has both traditional and unconventional qualities. You are concerned with family and social integrity, yet you will take risks in intimate matters that could destabilize your social life. You tend to be a generous person and have display strong feelings for animals and plants, but will not hesitate to blast someone who you feel is stepping into your territory. However, you are probably also, in spite of all your weirdness, a pillar of your society.



This is the sixth day of the 13-day period beginning with 1-Wind. Beneath your surface personality, you are strongly motivated towards communication with others. For some, this may lead to a life of teaching or performing. You are a carrier of ideas, a person with a message to get across, and you will always be instinctively drawn towards activities that will meet that need. You are an extremely mental person, almost too clever. You very much have a struggle between your need for freedom versus your need for community and relationship.

this story is really touching and proves that even when you're at war, it's possible to have love in your heart =)



The Cat who Crossed the Border
By Amir Kidon, August 2006

An unusual sight was seen a few days ago, with the exit of Paratrooper Brigade forces from Lebanon: one of the brigade reserve soldiers was carrying, along with all his heavy equipment and weapon, a white kitten. "On the way back to Israeli territory we passed through the village of Kauzer," said the soldier, "and all of a sudden I saw a kitten coming out of one of the houses. After a few seconds I realized it is wounded and that its hearing has been hurt. I picked it up and carried it for six kilometers, until we reached Israeli territory. I decided it deserves a better future. After all, it is not its fault that war broke out." The first thing the cat and its new owner did after having crossed the border into Israeli territory was to share IDF military canned meat. The cat was named Kauzer by its new owner.

I started a new workout regiment. Let's pray that I actually stick to it.


Focus on my core and abs
More muscle toning for my shoulders and back
Variety of cardio: swimming, sprints, biking
More stretching and flexibility training



I think that should be sufficient. I'm hoping to be in pretty good shape by the time volleyball season rolls around so I'm not vomitting up my LIFE when we're doing sprints. WORD.

Dear Hilary Clinton




WITHDRAW FROM THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE PLEASE


Love,

Bill Clinton
and me
and everyone else

I'm really proud of this paper so I decided to post it. WOO HOO! Feedback is encouraged, but not required ;-)

I warn you.... it's kindof a long paper. 11 pages double spaced. Nonetheless, ENJOY

( here it goes )

Good movie. Really fucking good movie. Gets you thinking about ethics, morals, life and death. Is it right to kill another human being? Does it depend on the situation? Do you have a CHOICE?

Here's my opinion:
We make CHOICES every single moment of every single day. We choose whether or not we get up in the morning when our alarm goes off. We choose whether we want to eat healthy or fatty foods. We choose, even in a time of crisis, what action we take. To say "I never go against my morals" is a lie. We all do once in a while. You have a choice, whether you choose to accept it or not.

I am against the death penalty. I don't have the right to take a life, nor does anyone else.





Eek! So deep....