It Will Be Fun, They Said

I have two types of chill playlists on Spotify: Ataraxia (Tranquility) and Good Vibes. While I've noticed that I tend to listen to Ataraxia the most, I've gotten back in the groove of my Good Vibes songs, which tend to include more rap. I've thus chosen one of my favorite songs from the latter playlist to be the backdrop of this post.

Sunset, by Kid Ink (I love his little hiccups at the beginning of each song)(explicit):

Or if rap (chill or nah) isn't your thing, another song from the same playlist then.

Are You With Me, by Lost Frequencies:

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I find that I very rarely, if ever, set aside time to reflect on myself. I am unconcerned with character development, I just happen to notice it in myself as it passes by.

I'm a little less lax when it comes to my future. I tend to worry about that a little more, mostly because I have no career path set before me yet. I can go in any direction with an ecology major, but there are too many directions - I've no idea which branch I even want to set foot on, let alone think about all the twigs that sprout off even further along.

In trying to figure out what I want to do, I've been looking at a lot of internship opportunities. Last summer, I saw a real job for me in the wildlife rehabilitation area, but unless I get a position high up in that department, in a likewise large facility, I don't think I will be happy. Not entirely because I seek leadership, but I want to be specialized - I want to go to grad school, hopefully for a Ph.D, but for that I may need to study veterinary medicine - a field even more difficult than a doctor or nurse. I don't think I have the discipline for that.

I'm scouring the internet for opportunities next summer already - which SUCKS, because no dates have been released yet this early in the year. I found a program that will let me research abroad in many different areas of the world, as close as Big Sur, as far as South Africa, and as exotic as Fiji. This sounds entirely amazing to me, especially because I can get an entire semester's worth of credits doing that. I was also sent an email from my school about another different, shorter program, which will let me knock out my required upper-division lab class, also abroad. But since that occurs in May and I will (hopefully) still be in Sweden at that time, I'm not considering it. If all else fails, an associate at my wildlife internship last year let me know of an opportunity interning at the San Francisco Zoo. I hope I don't come across as cocky if I assert getting into that program will be easy for me with a letter of recommendation from another wildlife facility.

This is all short-term though. What of after college? A reality, for me, that seems to be approaching a lot more quickly than for my other classmates of the high school class of 2014.

Because I didn't even question I should take as many AP classes as I could in high school, I am on course to graduating an entire year early - given a course I need to take goes through the study abroad team and I can take it in Sweden. Even at a minimum, I'd graduate a semester early (I was two credits short of starting college a sophomore). It's crazy to think that next academic year might be my last year. I started, and just as quickly I stopped.

I'm not really into this whole college experience. Everyone I know is either having a blast, or had a blast and is telling me college will be some of the best times of my life. I mean, I made a few friends, but none I can see myself holding onto - one is too uninteresting (she agrees with everything I say) and the other very reserved (but she texts her old friends all day). A few others I don't even talk to except in class. I don't see any reason to stay here except to postpone my entrance into the real world. I've made no outstanding memories, I agree the campus and surrounding area is absolutely stunning, but I have no personal tie to it. If I graduated right now, I wouldn't even look back. Probably because this was a poor choice to begin with, but I aimed too high with my applications and was basically stuck with this university or an even worse one.

College has become a chore. It is not to be relished, but is merely a stepping stone to the next phase of my life. I'm not happy about what it's become, I wish I had better reasons to want to stay and extend my time here. I was hoping that when the classes got smaller I'd find more people to be friends with, but now I have those classes they are just enjoyable partners for homework. The people here just don't fit with me it seems, and the fact that they come in as large groups from local high schools already with friends doesn't help.

I tried clubs at first. I became a part of my school's Quidditch team, but it was so awkward. It took months for people to recognize my name, and it felt like we met just to practice. We always talked of getting together for a movie marathon or something outside of practice, but if they ever did I wasn't invited. It didn't help that I wasn't very good at the sport itself either; I always felt I was in the way of some of my more athletically superior teammates. Some people were already friends from past years, and very quickly new recruits in the first months trickled out. I only stayed on the entire year because I was too shy to leave. The only friend I made there is studying abroad this semester in England, and since I didn't really want to rejoin the team anyways I emailed the team head and told him since I was so "busy" and since I was planning to study abroad next semester I "didn't have time" to attend practices anymore.

I don't regret leaving the club, but I am very bored all the time. I don't see any other clubs I'd be interested in, and neither do I want to try joining any again. I never even enjoyed the clubs I was in in high school, though I was a part of three. Those experiences are hauntingly similar to my foray into college clubs.

But I'm scared to leave college. I know how hard the job hunt is, and I'm afraid no one will hire someone as young as me. I want to hold onto the institution of the young, I want the comfort of someone there to constantly guide me along whenever I ask. I don't look forward to leaving, but I'm not enjoying my stay to the fullest. I don't want to become complacent in a job, but neither am I making great strides here. I've boxed myself in; I've nowhere to go.

I constantly wonder if I should've considered transferring universities more seriously. A girl in my dorm, my second friend of only three at the time, transferred to Purdue at the beginning of second semester of our first year. She realized this place wasn't a fit for her, and she got out early. I wish I could've been that brave.

I will graduate early no matter what, given the chance. I'm not going to stay here and waste money that can be saved for grad school. Paying outrageous sums just for the experience and none of the education is stupid, especially since, so far, the experience sucks. I'll just have to chin up and start looking more carefully into job careers from now on.

Pitting Religion Against Religion

I'm not in a very happy mood today, so I chose a not very happy song.

When You Break, by Bear's Den (explicit)

For all it's melancholia, it's a gorgeous song. Bear's Den may become my next band obsession.

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By far, at this point in the semester, my favorite class has to be Paganism to Christianity.

For the first three weeks we covered Greek mythology, one of my stronger suits in the world of mythology and religion. I've learned a lot of things that the Percy Jackson series didn't cover, like the Dodona oracle, the exegetai, Eleusinian Mysteries - basically, the nitty-gritty stuff that HoO didn't need to cover in order to make sense. Not to mention I read the entire Theogony and Works and Days by Hesiod, which covered five pages, top to bottom in tiny print, of notes about who fathered who and who offended who, plus little tidbits like the actual names of the three Fates/Moirai (Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos), the fact that Athena also goes by Tritogenia (Third-Born), and Aphrodite comes from Cyprus, hence her alternate name Cytherea.

Another interesting thing I kind of always assumed but never really outright learned was the complete and utter lack of secularism. Religion was the law, and kings or governments made decisions based on the gods' will - good omens and the like. In fact, Plato was the first to outright suggest that matters of belief could be criminal offenses. But then again, Plato wanted to ban jokes, so what does he know?

Perhaps my favorite thing I've learned so far is a quote by Xenophanes, and the TL;DR version goes, "If horses could paint, their gods would be horses."A.k.a., anthropomorphism is stupid. Quite interesting how skepticism on religion in Greece was tolerated unless it messed with the practice of rites*. Don't believe in the gods the same way as everyone else? Cool, unless you don't carry out the proper rites. You don't need to believe to practice.

*With the famous exception of Socrates, but to be fair, he was not only disbelieving of the gods, but also taught his pupils the same, and introduced foreign deities. Polytheism doesn't mean it's more liberal in tolerance than Christianity.

This week we started on Roman religion. Up until now, I had assumed that Romans took Greek mythology and just changed a few names around, but it actually worked out a little more like convergent evolution - the Romans already had their gods - Jupiter, Juno, Minerva*, etc. (Ceres was the first to become more Grecian, followed closely by the adoption of Asclepius - not surprising, health and fertility were pretty important things). It's more like the Romans noticed the similarities between the two sets of deities and adopted the cults of Greece into their religion. It was Greece's antiquity - that which the Romans very, VERY much admired - that garnered so much interest and respect from Roman citizens.

*In Percy Jackson, it seems as though Minerva was much less powerful than her Greek version, and Bellona took over her job position. As Reyna told Annabeth, Minerva was more the goddess of arts and crafts in Roman society. But I just learned that on Capitoline Hill is a temple dedicated to Jupiter Optimus Maximus, as well as Juno and - surprise - Minerva. Riordan, what's up with that?

I learned the Romans have no equivalent to the Greek Theogony - no myths about the squabbles of the gods, or who did what to which poor human. There were few stories at all, with or without a moral. Instead, they had rites to celebrate Rome's growth, like a certain victorious day here or a birthday of an emperor there (totally looking at you here, Augustus, you self-centered, conceited master leader you). This isn't to say they didn't sacrifice to the gods at all, but to them the gods were more like benevolent patrons of the state - you could say to worship the gods would be the same as worshipping Rome itself (though that statement is false, citizens didn't sacrifice to their city or anything).

Another interesting (in a different way) part of this class is the number of Christians/Catholics taking it (I also know of one Jewish girl). Not that the interesting part is that they're taking a class that talks about paganism (described by my teacher as "everything other than Christianity"), but how astute and quick they are to draw similarities between their religion and that of the Greeks and Romans.

For instance, I have heard comparisons made between the production of Gaia from Chaos/the Chasm, and the beginning of the universe in the Genesis. I've heard how the Golden Age of Man is similar to the Garden of Eden, and how Pandora is similar to Eve in that they are the cause of all man's misery (My personal observation, might I add, is how they were set up to fail from the beginning by God/the gods, and yet it is still their fault. Pandora with the tantalizing box and a curious heart created by the gods, and Eve with the tantalizing apple of knowledge and free will given by God). Most recently is the comparison of Romulus and Remus to Cain and Abel - brothers killing each other, yeah, I see it.

I don't know, but for some reason it bothers me how much these people are trying to find their God in everything, even in an era when the concept of their God didn't even exist yet. They're kind of like that friend that somehow always manages to make the conversation about them - "Oh, yesterday I went biking with my family." "Really? That's so cool, I once had a bike my brother gave to me, we went riding together all the time, I have to tell you about this one time where we blah blah blah I've changed the subject to me now, hope you didn't have anything else you wanted to say."

That doesn't bother me so much as what went down today though. A boy (the same who connected the Golden Age with Eden and Romulus with Cain) had a lot to say when we learned the Romans weren't as concerned with ethics.

Some backstory: So basically, the Romans had no dogma, and no moral code. To have the favor of the gods in their society meant one was successful, wealthy, and healthy. As Cicero said, "The supreme law is the well being of the people." They had social customs - they had piety, or respectfulness to the gods and the people around them - but their religion itself did not have a code of ethics.

A lot of religious classmates took extreme issue with this news. The boy previously mentioned asked if the religion didn't provide morals, did the government do it instead? Since technically the gods and government are the same thing. I thought this was a fair question, but it slightly unsettled me because it meant in the boy's mind there absolutely needed to be a guideline for daily life from a higher power. If it didn't come from a god, then it had to come from a god-like source. The possibility a code, in any form, didn't even exist in the first place couldn't seem to occur to him. That thought is scary, that he thinks humans are such weak creatures that we cannot independently and rationally determine for ourselves what is right and wrong, and that we'd screw it up if we ever did.

Another dude asked since the Roman society offered no moral code, did the citizens go elsewhere to seek guidance? This one pissed me off much more than the first question, because it implied citizens could not be moral without someone, probably supernatural, telling then what was right and wrong. In my mind, the boy's tone was condescending - how could these people possibly know what to do unless someone else explicitly told them? They must have gone to a different cult for guidance, they wouldn't've implicitly known to be honorable. This last analysis also pissed me off because it implied conversion - a practice many Christians love to promote despite the obvious discomfort of the recipient - not because they "fear God's wrath" and would rather prefer to "sin," but because it's an unwarranted and unwanted imposition of one point of view over another (Can you tell this experience is personal?).

I've never witnessed so many hands raised to ask questions yet - six in succession, quite a lot in a class where no one really has a hard time understanding the material. This phenomenon ties in with I've witnessed with other religious people, namely Christian and Catholics, who all seem fixated on a God telling them what is right and wrong. I've heard extremists - the ones who won't outright say that they think Christianity has a monopoly on morals - claim that without the Bible and/or the Ten Commandments, many people would genuinely not know what to do, and we'd have many more murderers and criminals in general without religion. An interesting claim, since recent stats have revealed .07% of self-reported prisoners are atheist. (What Percentage of Prisoners are Atheists? It’s a Lot Smaller Than We Ever Imagined)

I'm clearly revealing my own bias now, so I'll stop. An interesting note on myself is how I automatically link sources to facts after writing essays that need multiple in-text citations as compared to high school. It happened in my last post too.

Results and Conclusion (Is this a scientific report format I detect?): I am enjoying my class on religion the most out of my four total classes, probably because I'm such a Greek mythology buff to begin with. However, I'm not appreciating the constant comparison of one religion to another, supposedly and traditionally better one. But since I understand that they cannot help their upbringing any more than I can help mine, I won't condemn a person simply because their one view (on a subject that matters very little to me) differs from mine.

Discouraged Passion

My roommate is amazing.

How amazing?

Some people are just born with the gift of perfect timing.

Her essay reminds me of when I was applying to colleges and selecting my majors for each, and my parents were trying really hard to get me to at least consider a field in the arts. I love art, but I'm a little narrow-minded and self-centered in my pursuits - I only like art when I'm the one doing it. I adore playing the piano and I love to draw and paint - but if I were to attend a symphony or visit a museum, I'd get bored very quickly.

Besides that, I also didn't want to pursue art because there's little to no job stability. It's interesting how much of what we fondly remember of the classical era is art - epic poetry, statues, murals, architecture, and of course paintings - but it's such a poor and uncertain field to follow in the post-modern age. I wish I weren't so shallow as to have money be such an important thing to me, but it is a crucial element to a comfortable and happy life.

But my roommate has reminded me of how much I love to draw. It's fun for me, and a break from my computer, and I won't keep coyly denying that I'm not good at it anymore - I'm no Picasso, but I'm certainly better than a lot of other people.

In my first few weeks at college I finally got back into my Evanescia project and finished Aria - whom I had technically finished last October but just never got around to editing. I no longer have my Wacom tablet with me so I decided to leave the pencil marks rather than smoothing it out like I did with the previous people. Besides, I didn't want to mess up the blonde hair, as it wouldn't've done well with the jet-black shininess look anyways.

I got another person done too and ready for editing, but I'll probably wait a few weeks before I finish that too.

It's nice having motivating people around me again.

End of a Three-Month Era

This is the song I want to play when I hear/read people pull the god-awful "Stay in your lane" card.

Lane Boy, by twenty one pilots

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On July 24th, I took my final exam for my internship. It was relatively easy, seeing as it was open note. My boss wanted us to be able to look up information we need rather than relying on memory - a thought I hugely appreciated for some questions.

The community at this place was amazing. I wish I had been a volunteer with the wildlife instead of with the dogs those three years ago. The area was much smaller, and I actually was able to recognize and talk to the other people who worked there. There was a lot more to do when I got bored, even though I was there nine hours each shift.

I can't really have a single topic for this post; rather, I'm just going to recount some thoughts and fond memories I had during this experience.

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Towards the end, I was on lunch break with a 3rd term intern (I was 2nd term). Early on she had come to me seeking a sort of mentor, because I was called in on an off day to help with staff shortage, and she was in Recovery by herself with no other staff on her first day. Anyways, during the lunch we somehow got to talking about the staff and other people at the workplace and our relations with them. We talked about the friendliness/not-so-friendliness of the various staff members there, and in order to make her feel better I recounted my experiences and first impressions of them to kind of give her some "inside intel."

She then likened me with a different intern - an intern who, in 1st term, acted as my own mentor. I hugely admire her for being so amiable and very clearly liked by everyone. She is hardworking, reason-driven, and pretty knowledgable about wildlife medicine in a program where most people are newcomers to the field. From the beginning I aspired to be like her; I have a (perhaps unhealthy) need to please people - I crave praise and recognition.* I wanted to be as well-liked as her.

So when my friend told me I was like this 1st term intern - as well as I can remember it, she said, "You're like MS, it seems like everyone likes you" - it felt as though my consciousness burst out of my body and went spiraling up into the sky. It was the best thing anyone had said to me all summer.

It was similar to another experience I had, though I'll explain the differences later. About a week before my term ended, my boss pulled me into his office and had me shut the door and everything. He told me he just wanted to say that I had done a superb job that summer, and everyone (staff) not only liked working with me, but looked forward to my shifts because "they knew that everything would go smoothly and quietly when I was around." He told me I was definitely one of the favorite interns. I wonder if he knows, due to my record-low confidence, how much saying that really meant to me.

It's different than the comment from the intern though, because I feel as though praise directly from your peers means a lot more than something said to you through a grapevine. I'm incredibly gratified by both comments - they both say practically the same thing - it's just that one of them felt a lot more intimate.

*Ironic, because I have no idea how to receive praise and recognition. I'm the vending machine trying to accept a wrinkly dollar.

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Raccoons are demon terrors spawned from the Seventh Circle of Dante's Hell. Baby raccoons, on the other hand, are the cutest goddamn things anyone will ever see with their mortal eyes. Especially when they nurse.

And owls are among the most crazy defensive birds we get - they like to go for the eyes. Hawks, oddly enough, are pretty chill - depending on the species and size (smaller = crazier).

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Seeing the reasons why animals come in has made me pretty angry at the world population. We see lots of birds come in who were caught by cats, whose owners no doubt think it's perfectly natural and okay for a domesticated species to hunt live food, and therefore let their cat outdoors. I don't want to count the number of birds we had to pull due to subcutaneous emphysema - subcutaneous meaning "under skin" and emphysema meaning "trapped air." Basically, a bird's respiratory system consists of six air sacs which act as bellows, moving oxygen around. If one of them is ruptured, the air is released under the skin and creates a giant bubble I saw most often on the leg.

We also get in a lot of "bird-napped" nestlings, where unsuspecting people picked a bird off the sidewalk thinking it was abandoned (it probably isn't, most birds people bring in are fledgelings that just can't fly well yet. Besides, it is a complete myth that parents won't return to a baby bird with human scent on it). I am much more inclined to be sympathetic to these people, as I'm sure they thought they were doing the right thing. It just creates more work for us, treating an already healthy bird to release.

But most recently, the most common species we've been getting in seasonally uncommon numbers is the common murre:

*Like all seabirds, their beaks are sharp and they're not afraid to use them. I still have a scar on my thumb due to another intern's lack of attention to restraining the head while I held the body (he had a good distraction, it was an interesting injury).*

This time, it's not really any individual's fault, but rather a perverse group effort. Before your imagination takes you somewhere else, I'm talking about climate change.

People can say whatever they want, but it's inarguable that the global average temperature is slowly increasing - by .8 Celsius since 1880, or 1.4 Fahrenheit, with two-thirds of this warming occurring since 1975. (earth observatory.nasa.gov) Warmer waters means species shift locations to find ranges that still support their abiotic tolerances. In this case, fish are swimming to deeper, cooler depths than the young, inexperienced murres can dive to. Because of this, nearly all of the murres we're getting have emaciation as their main ailment. Just before I left, we got in four fledgling murres, one with a fractured wing, and all of them needed to be gavaged, or tube fed formula, because they were too weak to feed themselves. Right now, at a sister facility, they have over 200 murres - a number way above average. I shudder to think how many more don't make it to the facilities in the first place. It's pretty awful. More can be read here.

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That pretty much wraps up my last few weeks as an intern, and then the following few weeks as a regular volunteer before I left for college. I don't know if I want to pursue wildlife rehabilitation as a job, though it does pop up under the potential jobs on my major's page. My boss even said that if I weren't still going though college, I'd have a "golden ticket" to a job at their newest facility elsewhere in the Bay Area - me and my fellow 2nd term intern.

The work is certainly incredibly rewarding, and some staff members there revealed they didn't even pursue tertiary education very passionately and yet they still ended up in a medical field. I would love to work with animals, always have, but job comfort and income are also important factors to me, and wildlife rehab isn't a very lucrative job. But that's an existential crisis for another day.

Compassion Fatigue

Possibly, I think, the most ironic and yet fitting song title I've linked so far, in regards to topic.

Dead Hearts, by Stars:



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"Compassion fatigue: a.k.a secondary traumatic stress (STS), is a condition characterized by a gradual lessening of compassion over time. It is common among individuals that work directly with trauma victims such as nurses, psychologists, first responders, and health unit coordinators."

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In my internship's last module, we went over this phenomenon. I don't think we have it as bad as doctors and nurses, though - if an ER patient comes in critical condition, you imagine lots of frenzy, perhaps a gas mask and immediate surgery to fix whatever's wrong. They must immediately begin to try to save the person's life; they put everything they've got into saving lives. To fail after such intense work, well...

Wildlife rehabilitation is different. There are no rushing gurneys, no prepped surgery suites. Boxed animals are brought into the exam room and looked at with little fuss. Broken bones, concussions, even abnormal coldness - all can spell euthanasia for a wild animal. And it makes sense, in a morbid way, because A) We only have so much room. We can't take in an animal with little chance at survival when there are others more securely rehabilitated, B) Even if we save the life, if the wrong body part was harmed or amputated - if a necessary appendage for survival in the wild is taken away - they have no chance of being successfully released, and C) Sometimes, they are already so far gone it would be kinder to pull them. Pulling the plug on a human is a horrible concept, and only done after every available resource is exhausted. With animals, if the condition they come in is bad enough, there aren't any resources to draw from in the first place.

This isn't to say that we don't try at all to save animals. One great, recent story is about a Great Horned Owl that was caught in a barbed wire fence, and quite literally tore a hole in his wing. It took many months, but the tissue healed, live feeding trials were a success, and the owl was released with a scar in his wing but able to fly quite confidently.

On the other hand, we got in a common raven about two months ago, who seemed like a good candidate for release. We fed, housed, and medicated him for over a month, hoping he would get better, but began to notice that he was still too vocal, kept gaping for food, and, while self-feeding a bit, wasn't displaying proper raven behavior. Our vet suspected blindness, so we took him out into an aviary to test him. Her hypothesis was correct - the raven was completely blind. He kept waking in circles, and didn't even attempt to fly. A bird like this would never last outside our facilities, so after a month of treatment, he was pulled.

I wouldn't say I have compassion fatigue. It's true that I don't feel much when we can't save an animal, but that was to begin with. It's with people like my boss that have been doing this for years that should have it. But no one really does. Everyone laughs a lot and jokes around, but I suppose it is in the workplace. It's at home where this would be revealed.

I've noticed one way that staff copes with all this death is to adopt a rather dark sense of humor. They don't poke fun at any animal's bad luck, but they crack some jokes that you feel bad at for laughing. For instance, we make bets based on how bad someone's hematocrit reading will be, or just before a live feeding, give the poor mice's their "Last Supper."

I would like to clarify we never play with the animals; we never mishandle or grope them to, say, see how that joint works or flap their wings, dead or alive. We are always prioritizing their comfort - like it would be so much easier to administer Fatal + in the jugular, but we don't do that because A) It's more painful in such a sensitive area, and B) They can see us there. Much better to cover their head and use a leg, back, or wing vein.

Back to the actual topic.

I want to say I don't have compassion fatigue. I mean, it's true that I don't react as strongly to death as other people, but I never really did in the first place. It was just something I accepted. This animal is not going to recover no matter what we throw at it, I'd tell myself. It's death is inevitable. All we can do it assist it on its way. We have to move on. There are actual animals with an actual chance of surviving that need my attention more than some doomed life.

However harsh it sounds, I've reread and re-edited the previous paragraph multiple times and I feel it best represents how I feel. But I have been thinking, and after my whole experience with this internship, I know myself better than this than to think I actually haven't changed at all. At the beginning, if an animal was pulled, I'd be really quiet for a while, and it would take me a bit to rebound back into happy-go-lucky form. Now though, I'm more or less indifferent to the whole thing. I do the whole "Bad Luck" thing, then go on my way. So, in this regard, I do actually have a mild case of compassion fatigue.

Now that I think about it, compassion fatigue and cynicism are pretty closely related. Maybe I've just gotten more cynical since I graduated high school.

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I didn't want to end on such a downtrodden note, so I'm going to add a comic I found in the newspapers at work (we use the newspapers as substrate for the condos and reptariums).

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Also, I've been quite the photographer at work throughout the summer, and I've compiled a lot of photos of interesting wildlife. I think what I will do is go back to my old high school hobby of researching an animal/plant every week, just for the sake of knowing. But now, I have my own photos!

(I'll probably still use some online stock though; hard to get a shot of a flying raptor with a camera phone)

The Saving of Insignificant Lives

This post is too somber for actual music. I chose a gorgeous soundscape instead, one of my favorites.

Fortune Soul, by Blackmill

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Four weeks ago, I euthanized a male mallard duck.

Or at least, I was an assistant in his death; I was the one who held him down so he didn't make the process any harder than it had to be.

I was told it was completely painless, that the central nervous system was the first to shut down so he wouldn't be aware of his heart stopping, that to live with a calcified wing joint would be much worse than death.

I took his death well, I believe. It wasn't even like I was trying to hide emotion in the face of a (then) stranger. I genuinely felt no pity for the poor duck. I accepted his fate, that if he were to be released he would die anyways. In fact, I almost think I caught myself faking a little sadness for the staff member's sake; I didn't want to appear a complete robot.

But a week later, a fellow intern and I assisted in the euthanization of a crow with a severe concussion. We could literally see him drifting in and out of consciousness, and he was unable to sit upright or hold his head up. It was a lost cause, so the staff got the Fatal +* ready. But at the point of injection, I noticed the other intern beginning to cry. The staff noticed too, and comforted her. She recomposed herself after we left intake. We had other animals to care for. She didn't have time to cry.

*Fatal + is the name for the anesthesia we administer. It's very similar to anesthesia used for humans, but we basically overdose the animal so they never recover from unconsciousness. As a person who experienced anesthesia during the extraction of my wisdom teeth, I can assure anyone with concerns that it really is completely painless. I remember lying down on the surgery table, and ten minutes later they told me I could get up. I was never even aware I went under.

Am I really that insensitive? Am I supposed to feel such overwhelming emotion for an animal I have just seen? Am I, in fact, completely heartless? I understand the staff showing no emotion; they have been doing this for years. I have just entered this world and, apparently, with such a cruel mindset as well.

I have since witnessed eight deaths to date in six weeks, out of the roughly 10 deaths daily (not counting those who die on their own in our care). I've seen more raw illness and injury in a little over one month than I have in my entire life.

I am an intern at a very well known animal rehabilitation center, which is most know for taking in stray or abandoned dogs, cats, and exotics to adopt out. But in this particular branch, we have an amazing, brand new wildlife rehab facility, where we mostly get birds - passerines (songbirds), hawks, corvids, and waterfowl - but also mammals, like raccoons, skunks, and the occasional weasel.

There are three areas: Recovery, Nursery, and Courtyard. Recovery is where we intake animals. People either bring them to us, or we get them from other facilities that don't treat wildlife. Mammals, seabirds/waterfowl, and large birds stay here to recover. Other than the actual treatment in the exam room, the stories that come with the animals are the most interesting. We've had a crow come in that was wrestled away from a homeless man (who demanded $480 as compensation for what he spent on it), a squirrel that was fed breast milk by the family that brought it in (apparently they wanted to get it back as a pet when we were done - the mere thought makes me cringe. There was also more breast milk in a dish with the squirrel...), a perfectly healthy raven who was only brought in because he refused to move off a man's motorcycle, and a mockingbird who's papers mislabeled it as an albatross.

Here is a mockingbird:

Here is an albatross:

How did they even make that mistake?

Nursery is where the passerines are kept, and sometimes squirrels if they can't be outside yet. I am not a bird person, but I have learned the different species just by walking around and reading the placard attached to each reptarium. Off the top of my head, I can say the most common birds we get are European starlings, juncos, finches, mockingbirds, robins, hummingbirds, scrub jays, sparrows (of multiple species - house, white crowned, golden crowned), rock pigeons, morning doves, and Brewer's blackbirds (abbreviated as BRBL, so we also call them burbles - so cute).

Courtyard is where we transition animals in Recovery and Nursery to outdoors. There are four aviaries for both passerines and squirrels, all decorated with potted trees and branches and hanging sticks - as close to the real thing as we can get. We also have a small garden where we grow chard and a variety of kales, to feed the pigeons, doves, and waterfowl. Also in courtyard are large raptor aviaries, where there are sometimes hawks, owls, ravens, and crows. There are also small and large enclosures for the mammals. In addition to all this, we have two large pools, labeled Seabird and Waterfowl, as well as two small treatment baths, to test for waterproofing.

Out of all of this, Nursery used to be my favorite. When I just started, I felt very self-concious whenever there wasn't any work to be done. Nursery takes care of that problem, because there is always work to be done. We have four feeding timers - 30 min., 45 min., 1 and 2 hours - and they are constantly going off. There are always birds to feed who can't feed themselves. However, now that I am much more comfortable with the people who work here, I have to say I agree with a lot of the other interns thus far - Recovery is the best. As one woman said (the one who cried), everything else - the courtyard cleaning, the nursery feedings, the baby raccoon terrors - hell, the entire internship - all of it is just a ticket into the exam room. There's nothing I like better than getting a new box without knowing what's in it, taking the animal out, and figuring out what's wrong with it and what to do with it.

Sometimes, of course, there's nothing we can do with it. Sometimes a well-meaning person brings in an animal that is too far gone, or they "saved" it from a predator, and we can't do anything but bring it it's inevitable end. Just this Tuesday, we got in a juvenile red-tailed hawk with trichomoniasis. While it's treatable, the bird had too severe a case, and it was so malnourished there wasn't much hope. After it was euthanized, another intern took some pictures of the case and emailed them to me. Here are a couple:

Notice the black at the back of the throat? Those aren't just shadows. Those are pretty advanced lesions, caused by the parasite. Lesions are usually cream-colored, and can grow big enough to block the esophagus and eventually suffocate the bird. This hawk's esophagus was covered with the stuff, and about half of its tongue, too. Also, the outer, upper part of its beak, which is supposed to be yellowish, was a sick greenish tone.

Here's a spread shot of the hawk, with me holding it:

I didn't do a very good job. The wings are much wider; the joint between the radius/ulna and metacarpals could've been extended a lot more. Interesting how they have the exact same names as our bones? Evolution ftw.

You can't really tell from the picture, but the bird was so emaciated you could feel its keel. That's the "breastbone" of a bird, it's nearly equivalent to our sternum but very wide and very flat. In a healthy bird, you should just barely be able to feel it. In this case, you could actually pinch it. There was no muscle whatsoever.

Keel:

This wasn't some common mallard or crow. This was a hawk, of possibly the best-know species in California. And yet, I felt no more sadness at its death than I did the others. While I am uncomfortable and unnerved by my lack of extreme sympathy, I do much prefer it to crying in front of other people. I can cry by myself, easy. I have much to pity myself with. Being so vulnerable in front of other people, no matter how close I am to them, is another story entirely.

This doesn't mean I don't feel sadness entirely in intake. I'm physically conscious of my body slouching a bit every time I see the Fatal + bottle, but after thinking about it, I realize I just have a habit of accepting things very readily. For instance, if there's some sort of problem that could've been avoided by doing so and so - I don't even think that. The problem happened, and the next thing to do is to immediately alleviate said problem. I don't waste my time dwelling too much on what (unrealistically) could be done. I've transferred this habit to the exam room. The bird is sick. It will not recover, regardless of what we can do. I won't cause myself any more distress by dwelling on its mortality. It is hardly the first, and it will hardly be the last. Instead, I'd rather feel joy when working on an animal that does have a chance to recover.

As Dumbledore says, "Death is not the worst fate that can befall someone."

"Wouldn't've Got the Lettuce If I Knew It Wouldn't Fit"

So a while ago, I had the amazing chance to go see a very talented person in concert, and right afterwards I wrote down the gist of my experience here before going to sleep, like with Pierce the Veil. But I've been so tired and unmotivated to finish the story that it's been sitting as a draft in my queue for over a month. I'm currently at the airport, May 9th, with nothing to do, so I figured I should finally knock out the story.

Expletives (not my own) below.

Multiple song links at the end.

---

On Thursday, April 2 of 2015, I had the opportunity to go see Bo Burnham on his newest tour, Make Happy. I didn't know anyone else who either had free time to go with me, or even just knew about him in the first place, so I went alone. I don't think I'd have ever been able to do that in high school, but I wasn't about to pass this opportunity up.

I had gotten my tickets late, so I was at the very back, very last row, right in the middle, in the same theater that I had seen in Pierce the Veil in. When I first sat down, it was moderately okay, because there was no one in front of me yet, and I could still see the stage. But as it got closer to starting time, people began to fill in, and I was regretting my spot.

This was just about when a man approached me and asked if I was sitting alone. I replied yes, and he asked (I quote, he literally said this), "Do you wanna hear the best deal of your life?" Naturally my interest was piqued, and there was a pretty nice but macho dude right next to me if the guy turned out to be weird, so I said yeah, sure. He then proceeded to offer to swap tickets with me, because he wanted his friend to sit next to him - and the offered ticket was for a seat 16 rows up, in row 10, second section from the stage. Even closer than the first time I visited this theater.

Miracles do happen.

There was an opening act, which I didn't expect at a comedy show. I thought that was only for musical concerts, but the comedian, Justine Marino, turned out to be a treat. She told us that she understood that we were here to primarily see Bo and not her, but that we'd have to just deal. Apparently, there was a girl in the very front row who had tweeted a picture of her boots on the stage earlier before the show started, and apparently Bo had tweeted back, "GET YOUR BOOTS OFF MY STAGE!" Justine's way of consoling the girl was letting her know that even if she got called out, at least her shoes were cute.

For some reason, she also talked about her attire for the night. She was wearing leggings and a long sweater, but she stated that just before she went onstage she realized her sweater was shorter than she thought it was. She addressed this problem by outright stating it, saying, "I have a boyfriend, so you can't get this camel toe." She also talked about her newest puppy, who was a rescue. However, I mean "rescue," because she rescued it from a breeder mill in Minnesota, a state of residence far worse than any pound or shelter (It's hard to convey sarcasm over text, so I want to clarify that she meant Minnesota was a place of boredom, and that she rescued the puppy from a boring life. Not that the breeder mills or people in the state are abusive).

I don't know how comedians do their routines, there's so much stuff to memorize. Justine went on to talk about how, though girls always get together in advance to get ready for a night out, guys never do this. And if they do, they probably talk about how many girls they're going to nail that night. Like, "I'm getting so much pussy tonight!" and things along those lines. She brought up a fair question: Why don't girls talk like this? "Daaaaaammn my pussy is getting so much dick tonight! It's gonna be a dick vacuum!"

I personally thought the funniest part of her routine was the last part, when Justine talked about weddings. She said she wanted to get married multiple times, and the audience was understandably taken aback a bit, but then she went on to explain it was because "it seems like so much fun, you know, I'm gonna have a different theme for each one too." The first one would be Jurassic Park themed. No way would she dress her bridesmaids in typical attire either. "Those hoes will be dressed as velociraptors, and I'm going to ride in on a triceratops, looking like a princess."

Her segment ended there, and she thanked the crowd for having her and disappeared behind the drawn curtains. The lights went down, and the crowd started cheering; we knew what was coming next.

Bo's show started with a recording of a choir singing along to a violin; this lasted in pitch darkness for a good half minute. Then, similarly to his "what" show, a female automated voice came on, saying, "Hello audience. Thank you for coming. You are here because you want to laugh, and you want to forget about your problems, but I cannot allow it. You should not laugh, you should not forget about your problems. The world is not funny.We are all dying. The world is not funny. 12% of the world's population does not have access to clean drinking water. The world is not funny. Guy Fieri owns two functioning restaurants. The world is not funny. So then, now that we understand the context, now that we realize how terribly unfunny the world is - Let's do this."

Flashing blue spotlights started going off, and a deep, autotuned male voice announced to the crowd that entertainers are not to be trusted, that they are not here to entertain you, but here to control you. Never listen to them, never give them what they want, and most importantly, never, make some fucking noooooooise!

Bo then came onstage, dressed ridiculously in a black leather jacket and skinny jeans, and walking with the emphasized swagger of a very arrogant boy. He started with a musical call and response, saying, "Ladies, come on ladies if you feel me say hell yeah!" (HELL YEAH) "Now fellas, come on fellas if you hear me say hell yeah!" (HELL YEAH) He went to ask virgins (got one), uncles (have you felt up your nephew), if you like drinking booze, and if you like to get high. At this last one, he said, "Jackpot" when the crowd cheered, and a bunch of flashing red and blue lights came on the stage, with sirens going off and police voices. But I live in Colorado, and as many know, recreational marijuana is legal here, so as soon as that happened, he told the "police" that they could go. The call and response continued with if you don't give a fuck about the law (say fuck the police), if that seems oversimplified to you (say their job is really hard), and if you have no idea about what's happening between Israel and Palestine (say no comment). After a brief melodic and "introspective" interlude, he started up again with bright red lights this time and a synthetic beat, singing "Let's get this show going, okay, okay, all right, one two three four -" The lights suddenly cut to normal stage lighting, and he said, "So I was at the store the other day..." Cue laughter.

Bo did a bit of improv at first, talking about how all us potheads forgot the show was supposed to be a month ago (the show was originally scheduled for March but cancelled due to a snow storm). He talked about walking around Boulder and going to a concert the other night, where some dude told him he looked high, to which he responded, "Why else would I be here? Since it's legalized and all. I didn't come here for the homeless music and mixtapes on every conner. It's free to tune a guitar."

He's right though, we have an outdoor shopping mall where a lot of musicians gather and play their guitars for spare change. I didn't even think about it until he said it.

He went on to comment on our theater, saying, "Lets just get two weird circular paintings on the wall - oh perfect," and, "Nice acoustics, lets get some bass up in here," (he actually did it, I got to experience the vivid subwoofers again) and, "Oh nice, McDonalds curtains" in reference to two arched window-things on either side of the stage with red drapes and mustard-yellow curtains framing the red. I'll just insert a picture, it's too hard to describe:

http://goo.gl/m2DHG3

He did honestly also say thank you for coming out and he's happy we're here in all that intro. It wasn't all sarcasm and joking.

He took off the leather jacket after this intro, revealing a collared, button-down long-sleeved shirt, but a lot of girls cheered anyways. He responded to this by saying, "Nothing gets the girls going like a button-down."

His first song was an interesting number titled "Straight White Man." Some of the lyrics were, "We used to have all the money and land. We still do but it's not as fun now" and "The churches never made me feel ashamed of who I am, but I get emails from Netflix that Gmail doesn't mark as spam."

It was after this song that Bo recognized an eight year old kid with his mom in the first section of the audience. He asked the kid to come to the front, asked his name (Zaylin - I don't know the spelling), and looked at the rest of the audience and laughed helplessly, like, What do I do now, I've been swearing in front of a kid! Bo then asked Zaylin if he understood the things being said, and when Zaylin said yes, he asked what Zaylin thought of it? Zaylin responded with a simple, "Funny!" Poor Bo told Zaylin that his mom was really cool to let him come, but kept pacing back and forth on the stage for a while after he sent Zaylin back to his seat, trying to start his next segment, but couldn't because he kept thinking of the little eight year old in the front rows. Throughout the rest of the show, Bo periodically referred back to Zaylin, even incorporating him freestyle into one of his songs.

Another song he sang was "Lower Your Expectations," and it was about not looking too hard for the perfect soulmate (while of course making fun of people who want a perfect match"). Lyrics included, "You want a guy who's sweet, a guys who's tough, a feminist who likes to pay for stuff, the kind of guy who gets along with your friends without being attracted to any of them; Well you might think this guy only exists in your mind... Guess what - you're right," and "If you want love, lower your expectations a few, a Prince Charming would never settle for you."

I think it was after this that he took off the button-down shirt, eliciting more cheers from more girls (don't worry, he had a standard white t-shirt underneath). I forget his exact response, but it went something like: "Oh yeah, 100% cotton. See all these girls sexualizing me."

He also performed a little skit about making a PB&J sandwich high vs. making a sandwich shitfaced. The "high"part included lots of action-movie music, hyper movements, and exaggerated precision when bringing the two slices together. On the other hand, the "drunk" part had the same music, but slowed down at least 2x so the sound was extremely fuzzy. Bo stumbled around a lot, tried dumping out the "peanut butter" directly onto the bread without a knife, and when that didn't work, just reached in the "jar" and ate it with his hand. It was at this point a recording of Bo pretending to be the wife began, and the Bo onstage tried to act natural and hold the "jar" behind his back. "She" pretty quickly picked up on the drunken fact, and asked to see what he was hiding, and when he brought out the peanut butter, she said it was a jar of mayonnaise.

Even if it was pretend, he put an imaginary handful in his mouth. Oh my god.

A quick note of the show, though it wasn't its own segment: In the middle of his following transition, he started going to the keyboard as though to play the next song, but then whirled around and said, "Fuck you spotlight guy, you don't know where this show is going," when the spotlight tried to follow him.

This was because his next song wasn't on the keyboard. He talked for a bit about rap songs today, on how all you need is a sick beat and some spoken words, and you've got a hip hop song right there. You can literally say anything you want. He demonstrated this with the nursery rhymes "I'm a Little Teapot" and "Baa Baa Black Sheep." And in truth, if I didn't speak English, I honestly would've thought those were legitimate rap songs. No lie. He also had at least four smoke machines blasting smoke during that segment, so he said, "That joke costs me $200 a show."

The next song. Can I just say. Biggest plot twist - ever. It was titled "The Breakup Song," and it started with Bo talking about a recent breakup of his. He said it began with his girlfriend coming out of the shower, and she basically said (in many lines), "It's over," to staccato piano music, to which Bo responded, "Eat a dick! Put on your dick-eating bib! If you don't like this dick, bitch, eat a fucking dick, bitch!"All sung to hardcore electric music. Of course, the girlfriend responded but kept getting interrupted, like, "You're angry, but you don't need to make this harder than it is, I try to speak but you don't listen - EAT A DIIIIIIIIICK - Hold on, please just let me - EAT A DICK - Oh my god, are you five, I'm trying to talk this out and you're just saying 'Eat a dick,' does that seem like a mature response?" So Bo says, "No! But I'm emotionally inarticulate, I'm hurting inside and I'm trying to hide it, so *crying voice now* eat a dick, bitch! Eat a fucking dick, bitch!" The girlfriend then says, "I didn't think you'd cry for me, I'm scared too, maybe we can work this out and not break up..." "*sobbing voice* Really?" "No, lick my clit! Lick my motherfucking clit, you think three lousy tears offsets three years of shit? Sorry you're not what I need, hun, lick my clit then leave, son!"

After this, ah, surprising song, Bo took the time to recuperate, drink some water, and just walk around talking. He asked the stage crew to turn up the lights to give the balcony people some love, then said, "Wow, you're all so white, lets get some diversity in here," and when the lights turned back off, he said, "We're all black in the dark."

He, like Justine, talked about raising a puppy. Well actually, more like watching a puppy: "Eat this! Live more! Let me watch you!" And he's talking about house training it, like if it makes a mess he brings it over and says, "Bad," and he's trying to apply this to other aspects of his life. Like his mom made him chili and it was really bad, so he calmly brought her over to it and rubbed dog shit in her face.

His next song is "Panderin'," about how some country singers, though they have probably never actually worked on a functioning ranch, pander to their target audience by using buzz words and general country song format. Some of the lyrics include, "Instead of people actually telling their stories you just got a bunch of millionaire metrosexuals that have never done a hard day's work in their life," and, "Dirt road, cold beer, blue jeans, red pickup. Rural noun, simple adjective - And then when you're not singing you're just kinda talking in the middle like this -"

Another skit Bo did was about his improv. He's know for having meticulously planned shows - his show what took three years to write - so he wanted to work on his improv. He told the crowd that he'd make up a minute-long song on the spot, incorporating anyone's name from the crowd. So he went up to a dude, asked him his name (Zack) and proceeded to get ready. However, the "song" turned out to be pre-recorded, with a blank left in it for Bo to fill in. It went a bit like this: "I fucked [Zack's] mom last night." Crude humor, but it got a laugh out of us all the same.

In my opinion, the weirdest song was "Kill Yourself." It starts out like, if you feel sad, or if you don't know where to go from here, I'll show you where to start - just kill yourself. Some of the lines go like, "Get it through your head, it being a bullet," and "Be gay in Iran." And at first you're kind of like, what? And you think it's gonna turn around and say something introspective, but the closest it comes is, If you draw meaning from Katy Perry's lyrics (he mentioned specifically her song "Roar" before his song) then kill yourself. It literally keeps listing ways to kill yourself - parachute attached to a fridge, skinny dip in a flood, etc. etc., until he ends with "Marry Courtney Love." At which, the entire audience was basically like:

I think his last skit had to do with appreciating another man's penis in the bathroom. An attention-grabber, right? He was talking about the other day when he was in a public restroom using a urinal, and he saw an aesthetically pleasing dick. And he said it was perfectly normal, like you don't need to like brunettes in order to appreciate the Mona Lisa. He even acted it out by shortening the microphone stand so it was about, um, the right height, and pointed the microphone down so it, uh, looked like a peeing dick. He came onstage, nodded at the imaginary guy, kinda looked down and away like you do with a passing glance, then suddenly whipped his head back to look at the microphone. A heavenly choir started singing, and Bo got down on one knee and kind of raised his hands in a worshipping fashion, eyes completely wide.

Yeah, it was weird. I'm ashamed to say I probably laughed the hardest at it though.

One of Bo's last songs was an old one from his last show, one most of the audience already knows the words to: "From God's Perspective." Usually, he doesn't like it when people sing along with his songs, as evidenced from one old video where he told a group of girls that he "guarantees he sings it better than they do." That day, his rationale for not wanting people to sing along was that the audience paid to come see the show, so he should be the one singing. However, since this is an old song and people are bound to sing along anyways, he asked the crowd to join in. It's one of his deeper songs; the last line is, "If you want love then the love has gotta come from you."

But it was the last song that was the crown jewel of the entire show, just like "We Think We Know You" was the crown jewel of "what." The song began with a spoken monologue, about how it was inspired by Kanye's autotuned rant about (insignificant) problems at the end of his own Yeezus tour. The atmosphere was immense, and the audience, after the first funny cracks at the beginning of the song, was completely captivated. It kind of starts off funny, with Bo complaining about trivial problems as though they were huge ones, like not being able to fit his hand inside a Pringles can, or having all the contents of a burrito fall out when it's wrapped up (hence the title of this post). I would try to describe it in more detail like I have done with his other songs, but I really don't think I could do it justice. It's not funny, and the audience stops laughing after one line that I will disclose: "Come and watch the skinny kid with the steadily declining mental health, and laugh as he attempts to give you what he cannot give himself."

He thanked us after that, took a bow, and disappeared backstage. However, the lights didn't come back on, and that's a sure sign of an encore, so the crowd kept cheering... and cheering... and cheering... until Bo finally came back for the encore with another old song: "Art Is Dead." It's basically about how entertainers, like actors and comedians, are rewarded for never growing up and getting money by acting like the world revolves around them. It's kind of hard to explain, but here's an example that may help: "I wanted my name in lights, when I could have fed a family of five for forty fucking fortnights."

He also sang another old song, "Oh Bo," before the very end. It's not deep or introspective for the most part (Look at all of Bo's hoes, looking for a ride on Bo's hose), but it was a fun one anyways.

That was the end. This time, when we all cheered at the end of Oh Bo, the lights came back on. I slowly made my way out of the theater (a necessary evil of sitting in the front), and walked back to the bus stop in the rain, smiling internally, of course. I kept my ticket safe in my pocket, and when I got back to my dorm I pinned it up on my wall, right next to my PTV ticket. I didn't scrub the back of my hands too hard for days, in order to keep the marks on it that the bouncer put there.

Some notes that were too consistent to put chronologically anywhere: There were lots of flashing lights that blinded me and I could barely see, but this wasn't the case the last time I came here. Maybe it was because I was at a different angle than before? Also, Bo has this small chuckle he does every time he breaks character that was very endearing.

Also note that there were a lot of intermittent jokes that even I thought were too inappropriate to put here.

I don't regret going alone. I can't believe I live in a town where I can take a five minute bus ride to see a lot of my favorite celebrities.

---

Song/video links:
Asterisks indicate my favorites from Get Happy (doesn't include what)

Bo's Introduction
Straight White Man
Lower Your Expectations
Making a PB&J Sandwich*** - turn your screen sideways
Hip Hop Tea Pot
The Breakup Song***
Raising a Puppy - this one includes a few good heckles as well :)
Panderin'
Kill Yourself
From God's Perspective
Can't Handle This (Yeezus Rant) ***** <-- *this is your subconscious speaking, pick this one*
Art Is Dead
Oh Bo

Grief

I lost a family member on Monday.

For some reason, it didn't kick in until tonight in the shower. It kicked hard. I wasn't expecting it.

I literally haven't had the chance to eat anything today, but I don't feel like dinner. I'm browsing the internet, but I don't really have a website in mind. I have conjunctivitis in both eyes, and they used to hurt earlier today, but now they don't. Same for the turf burn on my knee. I just want to go to sleep.

The last time I felt this bad I was in sophomore year, when my last rat Cookie died. Then, I stumbled around the block, probably looking very drunk and unsteady. I can't do that now. I can't do anything now on this stifling campus.

I don't like grief. Make it go away.

This was his favorite song.

Gentle On My Mind, by Glenn Campbell.

On Greek Life

I really like trap, but realized I haven't put any on here, so here's one of my favorite songs that's on the shorter side.

FinD Me, by marshmello
---

I've been so busy I completely forgot to record my brief experience with joining Greek life on campus two months ago.

Before applying to any colleges, I had fully intended to go out and join a sorority. Like, I'd ask colleges while touring about their Greek life activity on campus. But then I came to my university, where people in that scene are more like the kinds in the movies  - lots of pretty floral dresses and killer heels and curly blonde hair - and less like the kinds you'd expect. So I forwent an application and, except for one party at the beginning of the year (dragged along by a girl on my floor, and I ended up leaving maybe 30 minutes in), I expected it to be the last of sororities that I'd see.

A different topic - in Biology and Chemistry last semester, I became friends with a girl who coincidentally also happened to be in both of my lectures. She had some other friends in Chemistry, and we all sat together. This semester, one of those friend-of-a-friend girls (whose name is strikingly similar to mine, I thought she was typing my name when she was typing in her contact info) had tried to rush for a sorority, Sigma Psi Zeta, last semester, but there was some mishap with her mailed grades and she couldn't go through. She was trying again this semester, and invited me to go along with her.

We met up maybe an hour before it was time, during which she told me it was an Asian interest sorority - separate from the Panhellenic campus groups - and I understood why she invited me. The girls were really nice, and I met another girl with blue hair there too. But, to be honest, it was too overwhelming for me. I pride myself on being really nice to strangers, but it was hard when I had about 20 different names thrown at me at once and I couldn't even remember who was who.

The next night was themed Canvas and Mock-tail night. We were given canvases to paint on, and told that they would later be donated to either a struggling school or an orphanage (I can't remember which. Somewhere kids were struggling and needed motivation). So, me being me, I started running through all the meaningful Harry Potter quotes in my head. I settled on, "Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light."

But I only had a tiny little 4x4 inch canvas, so the quote turned out more like:

I hope whichever kids got it, liked it.

I wasn't really intending to join, I just went along for something to do both nights. This was during a time when I was trying to plan my summer, and as I was really busy I declined to add one more thing to my plate and pen a bunch of sorority events into my already busy calendar. I was busy internship/job hunting, I was getting tickets for my return flight for spring break (which I am on now), I was looking up colleges for studying abroad, I was finishing essays and projects and oral presentations, I was apartment hunting.

On top of all that, I was also planning a month-long trip around Europe with an old high school friend for summer, and I was corresponding with her everyday on whether it was feasible or not, so I was just generally not in a mood to waste my little free time in uncomfortable situations. I ended up skipping the last rush day, and I don't really regret it. I don't think it was big enough yet to create connections that Greek life is famous for, unlike Alpha Phi (the huge sorority my grandmother was a part of, and wanted me to join. She even offered to write a letter of rec. for me.*)

I'm still really good friends with the girl who invited me, and I met a new girl too who's also in the same sorority and the same biology class. I'd like to believe I made the right choice, but since I still have very few friends, I sometimes wonder if I should legitimately try next semester. It's a good gate to many new friends at once, plus their sibling fraternity (I forgot the actual term, I don't think it's sibling) - double the friends all at once.

But I've been thinking, and I'd rather meet people through classes. Chances are interests will be more similar that way, and it's usually only one person at a time. I don't have enough confidence to talk to multiple people at once anyways.

That concludes my brief experience with Greek life.

*I just realized, it was the Romans who placed emphasis on connections and family history and letters of recommendation. Interesting that "Greek" life has adopted that practice. Yes, I know all that from the Percy Jackson books. Sue me for such "credible" sources.

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I FINALLY DID SOMETHING RIGHT.

FOR THE FIRST TIME, I DID SOMETHING AND IT WAS RELEVANT FOR LATER I'M SO PROUD OF MYSELF GOOD JOB ME.

In high school, I had this brief thing of researching a new organism every week and writing down a brief summation of what I had learned. Some of the organisms were the sensitive plant, the maned wolf, and the living rock. One week, I went through my list of favorite plants and decided to research welwitschia, or Welwitschia mirabilis. Link takes you to my post with detailed research.

To recapitulate, it's a succulent plant, consisting solely of two leaves, that is considered a living fossil (like the horseshoe crab) because it's barely evolved since it first appeared in the fossil history.

In one of my more recent biology lectures, we just started studying plants - mosses, ferns, vasculars, and up. In the introduction slide, I recognized a picture of welwitschia showing up (along with a horsetail, which I also recognized at it's pretty common near freshwater sources in California)(I just realized I should clarify, horsetail is a type of reedy plant - not an actual horse's tail).

This excited me because this was the exact reason I started studying random organisms - to further my knowledge and know things before they are formally taught. I wasted no time in telling my friend (the sorority one) what that plant was, and since this isn't the first time I've told her random trivia about biology, she said, "I wish I had your brain."

If only she knew, she wouldn't say that.

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Shameless self-promotion about to happen.

This was also done as another birthday gift. Much longer than usual, but I couldn't bring myself to cut out any of the lyrics. 

Songs used: 

Things We Lost In the Fire, by Bastille

Low, by Coldplay

I'm thinking, as long as I keep this hobby up, there's gonna be one of my videos at the end of every post now.  I'm probably going to start posting non-photoshop mashups at the beginning now too. Too much confidence.

Snow Is Like Communism

Better in theory than practice.

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Drop Dead Cynical, by Amaranthe
(R.I.P headphone users)



I really want to see I Prevail this summer, and if I have to drive back out to college three states away to see it with friends then goddammit that's what I'm going to do. But they aren't the headlining group - Amaranthe is. I figured I better listen to their stuff, and I found this GEM on Spotify. I can't stop listening to it.

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I saw the trailer for Chappie way back in January, and I really, really, really, really want to see it. It looks like another one of those feel good movies where humanity prevails and family pulls together and it just makes you smile leaving the theater. However, since I have a lot of homework this weekend, plus a test to study for, I'm postponing watching it. However, I do have some opinions on the topic of AI, and I've been compiling them in a different draft.

It's taking me a while to write though, because in high school a lot of my friends were/are into electrical engineering, and whatever those people are called who focus on building electrical appliances (apologies for not knowing the name, they are very important and key members of our tech-centered society). These friends were mostly all staunch supporters of the progression of AI, and I was always afraid they'd get mad at me if I told them my opinions were slightly different than theirs. Ergo, I'm very careful with my wording and making sure my stance is perfectly clear. Ergo ergo, that takes time.

Chappie is SO CUTE THOUGH. He has these two antennae-like receivers on his head that look like rabbit ears, and the animators use them like animals ears - when there's a scene where Chappie is nervous or scared, the antennae fall back parallel to the ground. When he's excited or happy, they stick straight up. It's almost like personification, but animalification - giving a robot animal-like qualities.

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That makes me think of 6th grade English, when we first formally learned about personification and onomatopoeia and metaphors and whatnot. We were told that whenever an animal exhibited human-like behavior, it was personification. But now that I'm thinking about it, we label a lot of universal emotions as belonging to humans only. Crying, for example. Holding of funerals. When in fact a lot of animals can also do these things (Rats can laugh, for instance - that's one of my favorite links). A happy rock, or a proud nation - I think that's personification. But saying animals exhibit human-like emotions is silly.

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I just shaved my legs for the first time in four months two nights ago. I feel like a beluga whale.

SO SMOOTH

FEEL MY LEGS

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I went to the Downtown Denver aquarium yesterday, as a class trip with my Island and Marine Ecology class (plus the Oceanography class). An interesting thing is that there are so many people at my college that I see dopplegangers of my high school friends everywhere, and consequently I frequently do double takes. I had two double takes on that trip alone.

On the topic of the actual aquarium itself - meh. I guess it's hard to be impressed by an inland aquarium when you've grown up by the ocean and gone to aquariums located on the actual shore, but it wasn't bad. They had a mantis shrimp, which I thought was cool because apparently they can break aquarium glass so they aren't often kept in captivity. They also had Cassiopeia jellyfish, which anyone who's gone to any good aquarium has seen. They're the ones trolling around upside down on the bottom of the tank:

Yeah. Those idiots. Evolution works in strange and mysterious ways (lol evolution is no mystery. It's pretty clear how it works).

They also had three Sumatran tigers? And an animatronic orangutan?

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I live in a single room in my dorm, so I'm often alone. I figured I would go to a friends room (she lives in a different dorm off campus) because she said she needed to study and so did I. Because of the aquarium trip, I didn't have breakfast or lunch until 3:00 PM so we got a 14" pizza. It was delicious.

The cool thing is that her roommate decided to transfer colleges to be with her boyfriend in Texas, so now she has an empty bed. We got carried away and by the time I thought I would leave (around midnight) we found out the bus wasn't running anymore due to daylight savings. I ended up staying the night, and didn't get back until a couple of minutes ago. So basically, I just lived somewhere else for 24 hours. It's kind of weird that you can do that. Even regular sleepovers don't last that long. I like to think that if I had had a roommate, that's what we could've done all the time.

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I found out today you can't recycle plastic spoons or Pringles cans.

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Last weekend we had a huge snowstorm that dropped about 3-4 feet of snow, and it's still on the ground. However, right now it's a balmy 46 degrees out so I'm hopeful that was the last snowfall we'll see. But I still stand by what I said earlier. Snow is much prettier from inside a building. I don't have any snow boots, so I can't exactly go tromping through the drifts like I'd like, and if I counted the amount of times I almost ate some on the way to class I'd have to have an extremely impressive memory capacity. Plus, hot salt smells gross (They scatter salt to melt the snow on pathways, but it gets stuck in boot treads. The first set of doors in my dorm opens to a small room being blasted with heat, presumably to heat you up from the cold, but it makes the salt STINK).

I was walking around late one night though, and the snow was glittering like you'd see in the movies. My neck, nose, and ears were painfully cold, but that kind of snow kind of made up for it.

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I showed the friend I stayed with last night my "album" of compiled mashup songs, three of which were my own. I didn't tell her which ones were mine though, because I wanted her to honestly tell me which ones she liked. I was therefore overjoyed when one of mine, Clock Kids, started playing and she told me she really liked it. I think that's what's given me the confidence to put it up here.

This time the album artwork only took an hour for me to do, but I had to cut out 30 minutes still for it to fit in the music duration. I made it with the intention of giving it to my dad for his birthday because he really likes Coldplay, as the last time I showed him a sped up video he got really excited.

I don't think just one is enough though, so I'm already working on another Coldplay mashup for him, made up of Things We Lost In the Fire by Bastille, and Low by Coldplay.

It's more fun to make up my own album covers than to just crop two existing covers together.

I'm very self critical, so I can hear all the places where I messed up the cues, but it's not bad, especially given the quality of the acapella version of Cool Kids I had to work with.

Songs used:
Cool Kids, by Echosmith
Clocks, by Coldplay

Natural or Enhanced Beauty?

I'd been scanning through the Buzzfeed YouTube videos* as of late when I came across an interesting pair of experiments: Girls who wear makeup going without it for a week, and girls who never wear makeup wearing it for a week. The two videos are called "What It's Like To Stop Wearing Makeup" and "What It's Like To Start Wearing Makeup."

*There are a lot of SJWs in the comments of Buzzfeed. A LOT, most of them unjustified and just looking for an argument. There are also a lot of meninist-like comments too. Generally a lot of sexist people looking to be offended. I try to avoid the comment section when watching Buzzfeed videos.

Basically, the girl who did wear makeup a lot felt very vulnerable and self-conscious without it. She felt like people were judging her more, she didn't believe people who told her she looked good without makeup, and she lost a lot of confidence. The worst part was when someone told her, "You look tired."

Pro tip, don't tell someone they look tired. I wouldn't even tell my closest friends that, and I'm notorious for being sarcastically mean (Though I always try to pair it with a large smile, and I try to deliver the line in a way that it's clear I mean the opposite. I only use these comments on people I know will know it's just my brand of awful funny - I'd never say it to an acquaintance, and I'd never make fun of bodily features). I can't even think of any exceptions to that rule, and I'm the one who believes that there are always exceptions. It's kind of like never asking a girl if she's on her period.

(Never.)

On the other hand, the girl just beginning to wear makeup also lost a little confidence. She also felt like people were staring more, and was a bit uncomfortable with the attention (she also noted that while girls were perceptive of her change and complemented on her new lipstick or eyeliner or whatever, guys noticed something was off but couldn't quite place it). She tried to justify wearing makeup by saying it was for an experiment, instead of just thanking them for the compliment.

However, in the end both girls got used to it in less than a week. The first one decided she felt more comfortable without makeup than she did before, and the second one admitted that, as a girl who didn't wear makeup, it was hard to say that makeup made her feel more confident.

I know people who dislike makeup, and I know people who wear it every day. It's never been a concern of mine what they do - like I would never try to tell them they would look better if they "enhanced their beauty" or went with the "natural look." Whatever they like to do, I go with it (Though I did like to do other girls makeup for them for formal events if they'd let me, because it was fun painting on another person's face for a change).

Personally, I wear makeup to hide my imperfections. I'm not a confident girl; foundation/powder hides my flaws and eyeliner helps my eyes not be so mole-small. But those are the only things I do, and I can put it all on in 10 minutes or less (though I usually don't because I drag my feet in the mornings). Yes, the money I use on makeup can be spent on other things - books, concert tickets, iTunes, food - but that's my own choice. Besides, there are plenty of cheap brands at drug stores; I'm not into the top-notch stuff you see on TV commercials. I could buy two eyeliner pencils for the price of one Five Guys burger - and guess which will last longer?

(I started wearing makeup in the beginning middle school, but only eyeliner for my bottom lids. That pencil? I still have it after eight years, with a good inch and a half left of it. That's how sparingly I've used it.)

If I had better skin though, I wouldn't wear makeup at all. I'd much rather sleep in than slather warpaint on my face. Until that day comes though, I'll use it. Besides, I've gotten really good at winged eyeliner - a skill that took me four years to really master.

However, the people who say "Makeup is bad" purely because it supports the patriarchy's control over women (making them buy things they don't need) and things along that line are the people I have a problem with. There's feminism - supporting women in whatever they want to do, even if they want to be a housewife or a stripper. Then there are the feminazis - those who are 100% against all males (though they claim they want to end sexism); those who get angry at any woman who changes her natural appearance in any sort of way; those who'd get mad at you for shaving your legs. I feel like it would be those kinds of people who'd get mad at me for wearing makeup, and for being so weak and insecure as to not face the world with a bare face.

If makeup makes me happier, if it makes me more confident (a serious problem of mine), why should I stop? Why should I be unhappy to fulfill their skewed utopian world?

I will admit, there are some people who say they wear makeup solely for themselves - they do not wear makeup for other's benefit, and I do not really believe that. I do not wear makeup for myself, I wear it to impress others. After all, I do not put on a full face and then stay in all day trolling the internet, do I? That'd just be a waste of product and putting it all on isn't that fun. At least for me. As I stated earlier, there are always (usually, haha) exceptions.

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Oops, my hand slipped:

I did this about a week ago, a few days after the Owl City one, at the request of a Coldplay song from my dad. I've also started making mashups of my own, but no way I'm ready to post them. Refer confidence problem above.

Link to Wide Awake On Paradise Boulevard (the original name, I took a few liberties): http://youtu.be/Hho9gQccPCI

Owl City Nostalgia

It's only been two days and I've already created another album artwork. When I get obsessed, I go full out.

I had two favorite bands for the duration of high school. Owl City was the one I told people about. I listened to Adam Young's songs so many times that I memorized every lyric (no small feat, as this was a time before he began utilizing a common chorus). I could even associate melody with title - also a difficult thing to do as, much like Fall Out Boy, his song titles didn't often appear in the song itself.

So this time I typed "Owl City mashup" into the YouTube search engine, and while there (sadly) weren't a lot of options to choose from, I did find a video composed of only Owl City songs - "How I Became the Sea," "Cave In," and "Galaxies." Excellent song choices, as they were all among my favorites (though I did have many).

(Once again, check to make sure it's playing in HD.)

Original song

I think the cloud formation to the far left looks like a dragon's skull. Didn't plan it.

A lot of the stuff might look oddly easy; for instance, the whale and words selecting themselves with the moving dotted line to get rid of the background, or the words suddenly turning pink at what seems a simple click. But I actually just edited the processes out because they were so time consuming. I had to trace around the whale and each individual letter, and I had to paint over the words manually because they were black and didn't show up against the dark blue. You can't change the hue of black, like I later did once the words were painted pink.

Last time, the cover for "Applause Miss Jackson" took around 20 minutes to make, and shortened down to three minutes when sped up by 8.5x. 

This cover took nearly two hours. I've never photoshopped something of this scale before, so I guess it's understandable. My first try editing it resulted in a video eight minutes long - 3 minutes over the song limit. I had to give up on that version and start a Mark 2. This one I cropped out and edited so much that the video was reduced to four minutes when sped up by 8x. 

TL;DR, the first video was shorter pre-editing, but had to be sped up faster. This video was nearly five times longer pre-editing, but didn't need to be sped up as much to match the song length.

I think it's because I got really carried away cutting out parts of the video I didn't think were necessary. It was like editing a high school essay all over again - the teacher tells you to edit your essay by one page, and instead you accidentally crop out two and a half. So when I found out the video was only four minutes long but the song was five, it was like the angels came swinging down from heaven.

Or from the galaxies, I should say.