Gah, CBE (CSE? make up your mind!) citation style, you frighten me. No in-text references to specific passages? Sensible if you're citing whole research papers, but my paper is full of quotes that need attributin'! Realize that you want me to just put what pages I used as a whole in the bibliography, but good gravy that's a lot of pages for some of my sources. D:

Oh familiar MLA, where are you to comfort me in my time of need?

You've probably seen this twenty million times on your flist already, but whatever.

ANIMAL. DRUMMING MOST VALIANTLY, MAMA. And Rowlf and Gonzo OH MY GOD. Who am I kidding, the whole thing is excellent.

Won't be too long now until I can bust out my Muppet Christmas Carol icon for great justice. :D

Less-than-productive all-nighters suck, but napping on the couch with my cat is pretty awesome, not gonna lie.

I hope the novelty of him climbing into my lap never wears off.

So after much angsting about the fail that is the artifical Christmas tree market, I finally found one that ranked higher than "I don't absolutely hate it" and actually somewhat liked. For an artifical tree. Purchased it Saturday, which got me much well-deserved ribbing from my father. "A PLASTIC CHRISTMAS TREE? LOL ARE YOU EVEN A PART OF THIS FAMILY?"

...only today to read back through my lease and find that, actually, it looks like real trees ARE allowed. @_@

So now I find myself in a different quandery altogether. Would LOVE LOVE LOVE a real tree, but it wouldn't be safe to leave it up while I'm home for the holidays so do I want to have to deal with taking it down JUST before I make the drive home? Should I return the tree I bought, or should I sit on it until I can actually take a gander at what the real tree market around here looks like.

Alas there's nowhere that I know of where I can just stump off into the woods and hack at my pine of choice. It doesn't have to be big or very pretty, even.

IDK I'm investing so much into this. Probably because this is my first Christmas in my own place, and though I won't be celebrating the day itself here the season stretches much further and I'll be having people visit. Plus, CHRISTMAS TREE SMELL. I'm anticipating it.

ARTIFICIAL CHRISTMAS TREES WHY ARE YOU SO UGLY AND EXPENSIVE AND ARTIFICIAL AND UN-RECYCLEABLE? Seriously harshing my budding holiday spirit.

Apartment complex I understand the reasons why you don't allow live cut trees in the apartment, but it still makes me D:< REAL TREES ARE THE BEST TREES.

Have looked into buying a potted tree that I could then have live out on my porch the rest of the year, but haven't found the right one just yet. So far they are all over-groomed and un-Christmas-tree-y.

Trying to buy one now as A.) the prices and selection are good and B.) I won't have a good chance to buy one later.

UGH. Charlie Brown, I feel your tree-shopping pain.

My hair is in twin braids for I think the first time since I was...   Actually I don't know if I've ever worn my hair in twin braids.  Besides last night, when I did it in order to wrap my hair around my head and fit it under my wig.  Its at least been since 1996 that I'm absolutely sure that I've sported a braid, other than random people playing with my hair and temporarily braiding it.

Given that my eyes look like I"m wearing liner what with the risidual black face paint from last night I'm bracing myself for an increase in creepy dudes at work today.  Ugh.  I hate cashiering shifts.

HOLY HELL Y'ALL ITS FINALLY HALLOWEEN!



Little celebratory chibi pic I drew on the Watchmen pchat earlier this week.  Nut-covered caramel apples FTW, razorblades or not.  And over on the kinkmeme, an anon incorperated this into their fic! 8D

I'm getting ready to start hair and make-up on my Beetlejuice costume before I head over to the Anthropology department's annual Halloween party, so can't really do a long post. 

But!  For any of you in the mood for a ghost story, here's one from last year.

Happy haunting, all!  And don't forget to set your clocks back to get your extra hour of Halloween tricking and treating!  :D

God bless the National Center for Health Statistics.  I called them Tuesday morning with a request for the CD-ROMs containing the data from two surveys in the late 80s and lo and behold, what was in my mailbox today?  EXCELLENT turn-around time.  Now instead of an incomplete data set of 200 for my big research paper I've got ~25,000 patients to play with!  8D

...except that its all coded in ASCII, and so beyond opening the file in Excel I have NO FUCKING IDEA WHERE TO EVEN BEGIN WHEN IT COMES TO READING IT.  D8

My mother knows me very well.

In the mail this week I've gotten not only candy and a card featuring fabulously kick-ass female monsters drinking cocktails, but yesterday I opened the mailbox to find that she had found me some skeleton-print scrubs.  The top is black with purple bats and dancing skeletons THAT FUCKING GLOW IN THE DARK.  Just in time for my Thursday shift in the bone lab!

This is shaping up to be a most excellent Halloween.  Toshi and I went to a corn maze last night, conquering the maze despite the mud and our utter failure when it came to bringing flashlights.  Then once it went full dark we braved the haunted corn Trail of Doom.  Nice clear night, sky full of stars, and just cool enough that as we round the first bend in the trail a wave of natural mist descended upon the corn.  Very, very spooky, especially with the whole not knowing when people in masks and bearing chainsaws were going to jump out of the corn.  There was much screaming and clutching of hands and it was all around fantastically cheesy-with-some-genuinely-terrifying-bits fun. 

Also nice to have a clear day for a beautiful fall drive.  The trees are just coming into full flame and the drive out to the maze was an older highway through the outskirts of town, one of my favorite kinds to drive.  The corn in the dusk was very beautiful, white-gold fading to dark green, surrounded by clover with hard-packed trails between.   
 

8D  

The cat sat in my lap!  Of his own volition! 

This is a moment three and a half months in the making.

May have to do more with my wearing of the fluffy pink bathrobe he keeps mistaking as his momma, pawing at it and attempting to suckle.

STILL! 

Cat!  In my lap! 

<3

OH MY GOD.

OH MY GOD.

Doing some background reading for a paper on contemporary trends in female height, perceptions of female height, and potential effects on relationships and reproductive success, and HOLY SHITCAKES two pages into the first article and my mental outline has moved from maybe including critique of prevailing attidutes amongst the researchers themselves to MOST CERTAINLY JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.

Article in question is dealing with female body shape and how it relates to attractiveness, specifically critiquing the idea that waist-hip-ratio is the be-all and end-all and putting forward BMI as the true factor.  With you on the first bit, buddy, what's your evidence for the later?
 

 "Multivariate analysis of the attractiveness ratings for unaltered photographic images of real women suggests that although both WHR and BMI are significant predictors of female attractiveness, BMI is a far more important factor thatn WHR...  It is not simply that this paradigm is insensitive to shape cues, as when women are asked to rate male images in the same format and under the same experimental conditions, the primary determinant of male attractiveness is upper body shape--specifically waist-chest ratio... The finding that BMI may be the primary determinant of female attractiveness is consistent with the fact that successful female fashion and glamour models all fall within a narrow BMI range...  It is well established that changes in BMI also have a strong impact on health... and reproductive potential...  Therefore, a mate-choice strategy based on BMI also favors reproductive success."
 

SOMEBODY HELP ME I'VE FALLEN OVER THE 800 POUND GORILLA OF IGNORED SOCIAL VARIABLES AND I CAN'T GET UP.

All elipses in the quoted section cut out long citations to the primary author's own previous publications.  Shock and awe, everyone involved is a man!

This article was written in 2002, and they're only going back into the misogyny time machine from here (one of my main sources details how pediatric endocrinologists in the late 50s and 60s pushed experimental growth-limiting treatment onto their young, predicted to be tall female patients because if they were over 5'6" they couldn't be ballerinas or airline stewardess).  I foresee much capslock in my future.  Not quite the cool, collected stats that my professor asked for.  :/

Goddamn you, Disney.  Where is the enchanted self-cooking, self-cleaning kitchen you promised me through all those years of princess movies?

I am hungry and want food but don't know WHAT I want other than I don't want something frozen, and I don't want to cook it.  And I don't want (and really shouldn't splurge on) take-out.

As soon as scientists perfect the machine that allows you to punch people over the internet, they really should get around to perfecting some sort of mechanism that manifests homemade spaghetti etc. at the snap of your fingers.

WTH.  I'm having MAJOR condensation issues in the apartment.  Whole picture have been fogged up for the last few days, and the condensation is so much that one of my windows just sprung a pretty massive dripping leak (of the kind that requires a container to catc @-@) even though it's not raining or anything.

The heat hasn't been on THAT high, and has been out-and-out off for the past several hours.

Geryon is doing his best boy-at-the-dyke impression by licking what moisture he can reach.  Not the most effecient of window cleaners, but certainly one of the most adorable. 

Been reading some reviews for the film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, debating whether I want to see it this weekend or later maybe at the dollar theater, and a lot of the negative reviews are criticizing the film for being full of "negative emotion".

Umm... Have they read the book?  It's a story about negative emotions.  About anger and frustration and isolation and loneliness.  And eventually, forgiveness.  Negative emotion is the ENTIRE POINT, and it's why the book has remained a classic.  People aren't always shiny-happy creatures, and the same is especially true for kids.  Where the Wild Things Are is one of the few out there that deals with that in direct, simple terms without cheapening the emotion or undercutting the emotional breadth of its audience.

Now, whether the movie achieves that remains to be seen.  Overall the reviews are positive, so maybe it does.

In other news, once upon a time I drew stuff with peeps and then yesterday other peeps came along and made icons from the stuff we drew.

That plus Halloween decorating (FUCK YEAH MY FAVORITE HOLIDAY) plus my succesful attempts at homemade French onion soup last night which left me with delicious leftovers for my lunch have made my rage-tastic homework somewhat less rage-y.