Klopp's Quotes, Part I

(Pre-script:

I recently watched Guardians of the Galaxy, being a big fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and I'd like to take a moment to just rave about how awesome it is, but I'm not really great at reviewing movies.  There's something I really like about Drax; he's so refreshingly honest in a way that somewhat makes him as innocent as Groot.

Oh, and I'm hooked on "Hooked on a Feeling.")

So here's how today's blog post is going to work.  I have a thirty-three-page list of quotes saved on my computer.  I'm going to use a random number generator to give me five pages and pick my favourite two quotes from those pages.  My pages are organized by source, meaning you'll might see two quotes from one particular book (or movie, or famous person, etcetera.)

Why am I doing this?  I have no idea.

Page 18 (Pokémon page)
"I like shorts!  They're comfy and easy to wear."
(Youngster Ben)

"Life is a serious battle, and you have to use the tools you're given. It's more important to master the cards you're holding than to complain about the ones your opponents were dealt."

(Grimsley)

Page 29 (miscellaneous page)

"I like to give everyone the benefit of the doubt until I think they're insane."

(I'm not entirely sure who said this, but I think it was Kevin O'Leary)

"A substance so corrosive that prolonged contact can result in physical alteration... disability... possession... death..."

"So basically, it's made of this coffee."

(Elvin Gadd and James McCloud, Brawl in the Family)

Page 18 22 (wow, that RNG though)

"You must be truly desperate to come to me for help."

(Loki)

"Regimes fall every day.  I tend not to weep over that; I'm Russian."

(Natasha Romanoff)

Page 20 (a movie page)

"I told you my compound would take you places.  I never said they'd be places you wanted to go."

(Jonathan Crane)

"You know the Greeks didn't write obituaries. They only asked one question after a man died: Did he have passion?"

(Dean Kansky)

Page 18 4 (SERIOUSLY WHAT)

"Do you know what vegan chicken and rice is? RICE!"

(Rajesh Koothrappali)

"Under normal circumstances I'd say I told you so. But, as I have told so with such vehemence and frequency already the phrase has lost all meaning. Therefore, I will be replacing it with the phrase, I have informed you thusly."

(Sheldon Cooper)

Page 8 (Gilmore Girls page)

"So, Grandpa, how's the insurance biz?"

"Oh, people die, we pay. People crash cars, we pay. People lose a foot, we pay."

"Well, at least you have your new slogan."

(Rory Gilmore, Richard Gilmore, Lorelai Gilmore)

"I'm the perfect storm of caffeine and genetics."

(Lorelai Gilmore)

Well, there's ten quotes from my collection.  Go out of your way to use them in a sentence today.  It'll make life just that much more interesting.

And I feel a little obligated to post this here, after that random number generation.

~TheSequenceKitten

Living the Dream

It's my first day in Cambridge, MA.

I'm exhausted. It takes a flight to Toronto, customs, and then a connecting flight to get to Boston from Vancouver. The first flight I was sandwiched between two larger people who really loved their arm rests.

I'll admit I felt anxious. But on the flight from Toronto to Boston, as I sat in my window seat, the sunrise suddenly broke through and flooded my vision, and I remembered an episode I had almost forgotten about.

Back in eighth grade, my family took a trip to Toronto to drop my brother off for university, much like the trip we're on right now. I remember getting on the plane for the ride home. I sat by myself, my parents together in the row behind me. Of course, my brother remained in Toronto as the plane took off.

I sat there feeling lonely. My big brother had just embarked into a foreign world, full of difficulties beyond the understanding of a high schooler. But as I sat there, I remember staring out the window in a day-dreamy sort of way, the light hitting my face, and all I could think was:

I'll leave Vancouver too.

Prior to that day, I hadn't had any complex plans about university. I thought maybe I would attend UBC, and that's as far as I reached. However, then and there I imagined what my life would be like if I left. Independence, excitement, new friendships and new opportunities... in the warm sunshine it was such an incredibly beautiful dream that for the rest of high school, I couldn't shake off the desire to go beyond the confines of my hometown.

(At the time, I think my goals were U of T, or McGill. How along the way I ended up applying to Harvard is another story.)

And today, as I sat on the tarmac with the sun in my face getting ready to head to Harvard, I couldn't help but feel that I'd caught that light.

-cookielime

Pianissimo Impossible

(I still sometimes catch myself thinking "I should get a blog."

Then I remember: oh, wait...)

You know what I love about the piano?  It's easy to be mediocre at it.  It's very, very difficult to become great at it- but to be mediocre, that's quite manageable.  And at a mediocre level, there's quite a lot you can do.

Let me try to explain what I'm thinking.  I play two instruments: trombone and piano.  (I've also tried guitar, bass, cello, saxophone, and percussion, but I'm not particularly good at any of those, having played most of them for a few months at most.)

I've been playing trombone for five years.  I'm okay at it- I was probably one of the better trombonists in my high school- but that being said, I was okay at the trombone.  You know what trombones play?  Chords.  In jazz band, the only time trombones play melody is when it's a song specifically written for the trombones.  Saxophone melody, trumpet melody- that's a default.  Trombone melody- that's a keyword you put in the search engine.

The main limitations of the trombone are how fast you can play and how high you can play.  If you want to play something awesome on the trombone- you'd better extend your range upwards by about an octave.  That takes a lot of work, and a lot of time.  Then you gotta get good at sixteenth notes.

I love the piano because it contrasts so sharply with the trombone.  Those two problems (range and speed) that plague trombone players are much less a problem for pianists.  How many notes can I play on the trombone?  Maybe 31?  How many notes can I play on the piano?  88.  And anyone can play those notes.  After a few months of not practicing trombone, I can play about 26 of those 31 notes.  After a few years of not practicing piano- still 88.

The piano works wonderfully as a solo instrument.  You can play chords while playing melody.  If you're skilled enough, you can even sing while playing piano.  One pianist can do amazing things.

The trombone... is an instrument.  You can play melody.  Or you can play bass notes.  You can't play chords.  You can't sing while playing trombone.  One trombone should probably get a backup band.

And that's the problem.  As a trombone player- what am I supposed to do by myself?  As a pianist- I can do anything, if I practice hard enough.

Oh, and you can play piano right after eating ice cream.
~TheSequenceKitten

Postscript
The title is a bit of a misnomer, now that I think about it, but music students will get the pun.

Okay, I guess I could do this.  That's one thing a solo trombone player that no pianist has ever achieved.

Also this.  Maybe the world isn't such a harsh place for trombonists.

And for the record: every time you call us "tromboners," we die a little on the inside.  It's not funny.  I guarantee we've heard it six dozen times before you say it, and it hasn't been funny any of those times.  What are you, twelve?  Grow up or get out of the gene pool.

An Open Letter to a Me I Don't Yet Know

Dear Cookie of 2018,

So you made it through undergrad! (Or maybe you flunked a year, or dropped out to join the circus. Congrats regardless!)

Right now, on the cusp of college (I hope you still love alliteration - if not, please don't think of your 17-year old incarnation as lame), I'm beginning to feel a certain... lightness bubbling up in me. The soda that was high school has grown flat and uninteresting (and remains chock-full of sugar), while a gleaming flute of champagne beckons from Cambridge.

(Don't forget that the legal drinking age is 21 in the States.)

And now I have to wonder what you're like, the champagne flute empty before you as you step away from four, hopefully transformative years.

Are you feeling similar anxiety as you step onward to medical school? Or maybe a different branch of graduate studies, or has that been tossed aside for a jump straight into the work force? Maybe you found love. I'm sure you found friends. Is parting from them as bittersweet as it is now?

I'm a lot of things right now. Anxious and excited. Young and hungry, but hesitant too. It's probably less scary for you now, or maybe even worse? I hope not worse.

...

Reading this, you might wonder: "Did I stay true to my 17-year old self?"

And I know I'm still largely a naive dummy. I've seen so little of the world, and I understand so little of myself and others. So all I ask you to reflect upon right now, all that I hope for myself in the next four years is this:

Keep moving, growing, changing, learning. I'm feeling sad now that an epoch is coming to an end, but I recently realized that there's nothing sad about it. The past can't be changed (as much as that is both a curse and a blessing). The sweet memories and friendship that exist now, will continue to have existed in the future, even if... they fall apart in the time to come. There's no predicting what's to come.

This is real. Right now these friends, this home, this set of beliefs and ideas, they're my life, and soon they'll just be another set of stories trailing behind me.

So Cookie, now 21-years old (and finally able to drink legally), who's the new me? Does she still believe that, and does she still live, teaching herself to embrace change? I can't wait to meet her.

-cookielime

Let's Call It A Car Crash, That Sounds Exciting!

Achievement Unlocked: Collision!
Be in a car accident for the first time

I feel a little bad saying things like "I was in my first car accident yesterday."  I know a guy whose brother died in a car accident.  I'm still alive and obviously in a good enough condition to blog about it.  Some people don't get that chance.

This is completely unrelated to my "accident", but: don't text and drive.  I have no personal experience with other people texting and driving, but I'm aware it's caused a lot of accidents.  So don't.  Don't drink either.  And try not to sleep, eat, drink, or be itchy while driving either.  Actually, just don't drive.  All this traffic freaks us L drivers out.

(If you have no idea what an L is in terms of driving, you probably don't live around here, so you're not close enough to worry about me hitting you with a car.)

The first three terms I thought of to describe bad things and cars were: car accident, car crash, and car collision.  I asked Wikipedia and typed "define: _____" into Google a few times, and here's what I've decided:

• I was definitely in a car accident.  Very few people intentionally move their cars into the path of other cars, and I am not one of those people, so this is not surprising.
• I was also in a car collision, because "the scientific use of the word "collision" implies nothing about the magnitude of the forces." If you've ever bumped into a wall- that's a collision. If you've ever walked into a door- that's a collision. My car getting bumped by another car- collision. 
• According to Wikipedia, I was also in a traffic collision, the page to which "car crash" redirects. Dictionaries here are divided: by Merriam-Webster I would say I was not in a crash, and by Dictionary.com, WordReference and Oxford I would say I was in a crash (I assume we can say the collision was "violent.") Cambridge could go either way depending on whether or not it was a serious accident, but I'm certainly not being serious about it right now, so probably not. 

FINAL VERDICT:
car accident- yes!
car collision- yes!
car crash- probably!

In case you're wondering- there was no damage to either car and all parties involved were unharmed. But we were in a parking lot, so this isn't all that surprising.

The moral of the story is: if you're backing up, at least look through your rearview mirror or window or something.

Also, dictionaries can make for a very divided jury.
~TheSequenceKitten

I'm Basically Keanu Reeves

because I age in spurts, or not at all.

The proof is in my school photos. Essentially, there have been a few phases:

0-4: in which I was a baby
5-9: in which I was a slightly larger child, with slightly larger and less round eyes (but more on my eyes later)
10-16: in which I had the same face as before but the body of a chubby preteen
17+: the present, in which, after dropping sixteen pounds of chub and chopping off a foot of hair, I...still have the same face and look to be 14

This realization was brought on by my older brother, who recently came home from Toronto on vacation. He's always had fun teasing me, since I was born, but the classic "Stupid Mei mei" and "You're fat" doesn't really work anymore, so he's fallen back to teasing me about looking like I'm a ninth grader.

(Though I think he's given up on finding a good trait to mock now, as at dinner he he just decided to say "Look at you, all skinny and stuff" in a mocking tone, to which I, bemused, replied "Thank you?")

In all the recent family bonding (read: late night movies and spontaneous laughing fits) I've also realized that I might be adopted. There are seemingly only a handful of traits I have that can be linked to my parents, and they're flimsy proof at best:

1) The Keanu-Reevesness (technical term) might be from my mom who went into her late-20's still passing as a 19-year old.
2) My feet are clones of my dad's

Counter to those two: I'm much more tan than the rest of my family, my eyes don't resemble either of my parents', and I have these super spidery hands that don't match up to the rest of my family's normally proportioned hands.

Maybe I'm a dumpster baby. An age-defying dumpster baby.
-akacookielime
P.S. SequenceKitten, you need my permission to put screenshots in your blogs? Do as you wish! Just get buff.
I hold you to that resolution.

Egg, Bacon, Egg and Bacon, Sausage, Egg and Sausage, Sausage and Bacon, Egg, Sausage and Bacon

As I write this, I have yet to pick a title for this post.  Maybe I'll find one later.

I've started to get excited about university.

Oh, I'm sorry.

I've started to get excited about college.

...I don't know if I'll ever stop being bitter about that.

Anyway, I'm excited!

For example, today I learned that Staples is selling 80-page coil notebooks.

For five cents.

Each.

I guess this is going to be a recurring theme: one sentence, one line break.

What else is new?

I started a Nuzlocke run through in Pokémon Black.

I've taken some screenshots, so I suppose I could start posting them on this blog.

I'll have to ask cookielime, though.

Did I mention I got a learner's licence?

I'm caught between the British licence and the American license and keep trying to spell it licensce or licencse.

I can't wait to watch Guardians of the Galaxy.

This is TheSequenceKitten's brain on drugs.

"He has dreams which he'll tell you all about.

He can speak French.

Or could in high school, anyway.

A little.

His blog has four posts, all apologies for not posting more.

He is

the least interesting man in the world."

http://xkcd.com/621/

~TheSequenceKitten