memorial day weekend! mohegan sun on sunday. and tonight we're getting seafood and then going to see the conclusion to pirates. yaaaaaaaarrrrrr.

sedentary and ambitionless

other teachers at my school are dumb. today, a math teacher insisted that a whore and a hooker are different, in that whores don't charge money. he insisted. i was very firm that they did, and he was just as adamant that they did not. i looked it up on m-w.com right in front of him and he still wouldn't change his stance.

i still remember a science teacher who refused to believe that conch is pronounced conk. i maintain that conch being pronounced phonetically is only due to people pronouncing it wrongly so much that it became correct. i could be wrong on that one though.

also, today, i went to lunch with this teacher. we have a running dialogue where she asks me why i am not making way more money as an electrical engineer. and i explain i don't want to. this is paraphrased.
her: what was your major, mech eng?
me: electrical.
her: i don't understand why you don't make loads more money with your degree.
me: that's because you don't know what motivates me.
her: nothing motivates you.
me: (kind of surprised at being found out so easily) oh, i guess you do understand.
her: i know you have no motivation, but why?
me: ...

later that day she said that i had a sedentary, ambitionless lifestyle. that was genuinely a bit upsetting.

so either she overestimates me or i underestimate myself. i would pay money for a scale that measured my total worth as a human being and simply gave me a clean, objective number.

damn i was poised to write a lot of meaningful, life-changing material right now, and someone just pulled the fire alarm. during lunch! what kind of idiocy is that? honestly.

more to come - i'm in the blogging mood, or i've been possessed by the blogging spirit, or however the idiom should go. hopefully i will still have it in 10 minutes or so.

does anyone have a poster for howl's moving castle?

i ordered a signed copy of "the name of the wind" from patrick rothfuss. i spent at least a half hour leafing through the book trying to find a suitable quotation for the personalization. after rejecting,

"it's a goddamn huge dragon and it's going to come over here and eat us!" because it's the most ?casual? line in the book and it might have seemed i was poking fun at him for picking it out. not casual, exactly, but out of character? low language? i'm not sure.

"valaritas" because for all i know it means shitface.

"may you find the name of the wind," or some variation thereof, because he would be writing it on a book named the name of the wind, and that seems silly to me.

i settled on, "may your pizzle never fizzle," because it's funny. also one of the more ?hokey? lines in the book, but oh well.

i watched she's the man today. i enjoyed it much. it was genuinely funny, and at almost any point in the movie there's a pretty face on screen. i might even acquire the dvd. i have a soft spot for teen-oriented "shakespearean-inspired" films. as long as they have beautiful girls in them, i'm sold.

i also watched howl's moving castle, which started me on a wall scroll search. there are none in existence. it makes me sad. does anyone know of a way to capture shots from a DVD on the computer and then to make one's own posters out of it? i've always wanted to do it for princess mononoke since for some reason the only posters/wall scrolls are san and her wolf, and NONE of ashitaka and san together.

anyways, the howl search led me to nausicaa.net, which i browsed until i came across some interesting articles concerning "gedo senki" (tales of earthsea). interesting stuff, involving race, racism, and especially reverse racism. stuff like racism, abortion, or the war in iraq just make me tired. they're too big for someone like me to think about.

interestingly, howl's pacifist attitude toward the futility of war was not really in the book, and came more from miyazaki's own feelings as he worked on this movie as america went to war with iraq.