Awkward moments with my dad.

Why do the gross commercials with gyrating women selling something always show up when I'm watching TV with my dad? Or that one with the guy grinning from ear to ear because some pill is giving him a bigger wang? It's just uncomfortable. I don't want to acknowledge the presence of sex in the presence of my dad. I just wanna watch VH1 recap Saturday Night Live in the 2000s. I'm starting to think there's an evil little man living in my TV who makes these horrible commercials come on whenever my dad is in the room. Never when I'm alone.

But my dad is, thankfully, cool as a cucumber when this happens. This completely suggestive and cheesy Trojan ad for a "personal massager" showed up when we were watching the SNL retrospective, and while I promptly hid in my sweater, he just says "Jesus, I thought this was an SNL skit."

Go dads.

Up to Speed

A lot has happened since I last wrote here. Let's break it down.

Don't Ask Don't Tell got repealed! This coincided with the day I returned home for break, and the night that Titanic was shown commercial-free on USA Network. I obviously watched the whole thing. It's only been one of my all time favorite, would-take-this-to-a-desert-island movies since I was thirteen. Why would I pass up a chance to watch it uninterrupted by peppy people trying to make be buy cat food and moderately priced electronics?

I had just gotten to the part where Leo was showing Kate his drawings of the one-legged prostitute from Paris, when my dad emerges from his office and says, all matter-of-factly, "Leo was pretty adorable in this movie."

I like to think this was his way of celebrating the DADT repeal.

Then of course was the obligatory "I'm back in New York let's go to Manhattan and shop" day. I had tea with my sister and a friend from school, then we wandered around the Union Square holiday market getting gifts for people including ourselves. It was very cold. But we found refuge in a nearby coffee shop that also sold frozen yogurt. That sounds like a dream one would have after bad takeout but it really happened. There was an attractive Scandinavian-looking fellow sitting at the counter who totally saw us checking him out in the reflection in the window.

Five minutes later it was Christmas. I spent it eating way too much food and opening boxes with sweaters in them and trying not to flinch when my poor grandmother examined my nose ring. I hate to admit it, but I was kind of thankful the blizzard forced us home early. I was all too happy to collapse into the couch and watch The Daily Show OnDemand for hours.

As for today, I'm trying to be productive but all I want to do is nap. My dad and I are thinking of seeing a movie tonight, but I can't decide if I want to go highbrow or lowbrow. I know I should see "The King's Speech" so I have something to say during the Oscar broadcast and I can only gush about "Black Swan" for so long, but I've always had this lingering thing for Barbara Streisand and Dustin Hoffman as The Fockers. Maybe I'll ditch both those ideas and see "True Grit" because it'll still give me something to talk about during the Oscar broadcast and I've always had a lingering thing for Matt Damon. Any leading man who goes for a recurring guest spot on 30 Rock is a keeper in my book. Even better if they're from Boston. Hooh-rah.

I'm the worst college student ever?

LolCats are funny only when you haven't slept enough.

I can't pull an all nighter. I tried. I really did. I had to write a fifteen page paper and do some research for it too. But at around 5am I decided to take a two hour power nap. I would snooze for two hours, let dances of Northern Irish youth dance in my head (that's what my paper was on), wake up feeling great at 7am, crank out fifteen pages by 5pm and that that would be that. So I collapsed onto my bed, woke up at 7am as planned, hit the snooze because it was still dark out (thanks a lot, winter), and trudged downstairs, where I promptly fell asleep on the couch for THREE HOURS.

I felt really lame because I thought this was finally my night to be a hardcore college student and stay up all night like the boss I am. But I'm clearly an old person who needs sleep.

I wrote the paper in about seven hours. It ended up being 11 pages instead of 15. But that's okay, I hope so.

Tonight is my last night before winter break. I'm taking myself to see Black Swan, because no one is here anymore. Then I might delete some of the weird Pandora stations I made during finals, because I get cravings for music I don't normally listen to when I'm writing finals. This semester, it was 80s power ballads. My modmate was blasting them while we pounded out our last papers. It was kind of great. So monumental. Eventually I made a Pandora station based on "Summer of '69" by Bryan Adams and "Sunday, Bloody Sunday" came on while I was writing my last few paragraphs on Northern Ireland. It was weird and made too much sense for my life.

Charlie Brown, you get me.

Whew. I finally feel like a human being after feeling like less than one for a while. A lot of his has to do with getting an extension on one of my finals, which really balanced my work out a lot more than it was before. Also, I kicked ass on my presentation for one of my classes. It was on Northern Ireland's peace lines. I'm getting really fascinated with that conflict, probably because it seems like no one in the US really talks about it. Most of the books I've found on the subject are from the UK or Ireland, and you don't see anyone throwing benefit concerts here for Ulster or making "Save Belfast" t-shirts. I still wonder why that is.

Anyways, I'm surviving finals with the help of coffee and peppy music. I'm loving Girl Talk's new album and my Ting Tings radio station. Also, I have an appropriate finals week desktop background:
Charlie Brown, you get me.