So, I've decided to hop on this epic bandwagon. Blame albumsontheside .

Day 01 → Your favourite song

Ha, because apparently all I do is post about music these days. Choosing just one is impossible. Have a variety instead.

1. Magnificent -- U2. This song is a good representation of everything I love about U2's music. It's like...I dunno, sunlight in audible form, or that feeling I get looking out of airplane windows on the entire world below. Beautiful, bright, full of life and a thousand other things I could babble on about at length, but I won't. The instrumental part does things to my heart. <3

And of COURSE embedding is disabled by request. You fail, Youtube.

2. Whole Thing -- Peter Gabriel. Peter Gabriel is technically my oldest musical love, as I grew up listening to my parent's Genesis CDs, and has the weirdest way of cropping up in unexpected places in my life. As a solo artist, he has a tendency to get very strange at times, but I don't mind at all. He's more inspiring that way. Here's one of my favorite songs of his -- loosely world-music-y, but only for a lack of a better description. His stuff tends to defy categorization.




3. Lemon -- U2. I know I said I'd have one representative U2 song. I lied. One of the strangest songs I've ever heard, but oddly beautiful. And the video is truly a work of art.




4. Kiss from a Rose -- Seal. This is the first song I ever recall hearing as a little kid and actively thinking, "wow, I like that." I still love it to this day. Seal is amazing -- if I wrote music, I'd want it to be like his. There's just a lot of pure musical skill here. (Also, lol, Batman. Please ignore the stupidity of this video.)



5. Discipline -- Nine Inch Nails. Surprisingly, I discovered that I really enjoy NIN. This is my favorite song to work to. If I'm painting or working in the yard or doing something that doesn't involve a lot of active mental engagement, I'll put this on and slide into a kind of trance. It's fun, for industrial. :D


Woo!

(A/N: I have no explanation or excuse for this, really. It was originally going to be a meta on the whole Pop album, as per betareject ’s request, but I think I needed to get this out of the way first. This song, as it’s done on several occasions in the past, has taken over. Massive multimedia spam lies under the cut. You’ve been warned. *grins*)

We’ve all got one of them -- that song on our iPod that makes other people tug their headphones down and go, “dude, what the heck is this?” At that point, you’re forced to go into an ineffective, slightly embarrassed justification of what this particularly tasteless compilation of chords is doing in your possession.

For me, that song is U2’s Discotheque. Consider this my explanation.

( BOOM-CHA. )

Today, my sister and I walked out of our rooms at about the same time to head down to breakfast. When we saw each other, we stopped in our tracks.

My outfit: White tank top, purple cardigan, dark jeans.

Her outfit: White t-shirt, purple cardigan, dark jeans.

I swear, this happens ALL THE TIME. Like, so often that we have a system for who has to change their outfit so that they don't match the other one anymore. Are we just insane mind-readers/clones, or do you guys do this unintentionally with the people you live with too?

Also, have that one meme that's going around, for future reference.

1. first name?
Erika.
2. age?
17. I'll be 18 this February.
3. location?
Close to Cincinnati, Ohio.
4. occupation
Student, fangirl, amateur astronomer and professional procrastinator.
5. partner?
Nope.
6. kids?
I should hope not.
7. brothers/sisters?
My sister Grace is two years younger than me, and is one of my best friends. Non-biologically, I've got "siblings" all over the country, including Kallie, my BFF/constant, Jessi, my concert buddy and fellow artist, and an amazing if not slightly Mafia-esque posse known as the Clifton Clan.
8. pets ?
Sadly, no. I have been begging for a dog since the time I could talk, but instead have to settle for petsitting for the neighbors.
9. the 3-5 biggest things going on in your life?
1) I recently moved here from Charlotte, NC approximately three months ago, and it's the hardest thing I've ever done.
2) I'm trying desperately to finish all my college applications in the near future. They are attempting to consume my soul in the process.
3) Er, what's some other major stuff? There's the nonsense of school and geekery and writerly things, but those are pretty average. :D

Okay, now I've got to get back to cleaning. The Germans will be arriving shortly for Thanksgiving, and my deskspace looks like a trainwreck...

^ Behold the view from the back deck every night. Click to make it bigger, but careful, it gets HUGE. Apologies in advance for the crappy Photoshop compilation -- this was a panorama of four overlapping pics, but I didn't feel like trying to edit it much.

Leave me a comment saying "Boom-cha" and I will respond by asking you five questions that satisfy my curiosity. Update your journal with the answers to the questions, including this in the post.

vinyamar asked me:

1. When did you start watching Lost?
Almost exactly a year ago, haha. My Physics teacher, an awesome fellow geek, lent me the S1 and S2 box sets. I got through S3 and part of S4 just before last season started in January. Oh my gosh, it was insane.

2. Did you have a favorite character before Ben? Who was it?
My first love? Sayid. I thought he was kinda pretty despite the torcha-ing. Also, John Locke. I would have followed him to the ends of the earth, and there's still part of me that feels heartbroken and betrayed that his life turned out so miserably and ended so miserably after all.

3. CHRISTMAS! What are you asking for?
Hee, I'm so excited. I'm not really after much this year. I'm asking for some U2-related paraphenalia, a Dharma shirt, a world atlas, and possibly some bookstore gift cards. And perhaps plane tickets back to Charlotte to visit my friends, whom I miss. <3

4. What are your top 5 fandoms? In order of awesomeness?
See, these change rapidly and on a regular basis. Today, as of this moment, they are:
1. U2 (yes, it counts. I'm ridiculous, I know.)
2. Lost.
3. Star Wars (it's been my fandom-constant for years, though all of the best stuff in it now is generated by fellow fans rather than George Lucas.)
4. Stargate Atlantis and SG-1. (Not that new Universe thing. It's stupid and an excuse for teenagers to have sex in airlocks.)
5. Flashforward and V are currently tied for fifth. :D

5. Where did your username come from??
Oh, dear. See, back in the day I posted fanfiction at theforce.net, and needed a username. Star has always been my nickname of choice, but on a Star Wars messageboard, EVERYONE is named Star(something), so I got fed up with seeing all my potential name choices already taken and just tacked "foozle" onto the end. A foozle is code for a fluffy, adorable thing (my sister and I would refer to the neighbor's dogs as "foozly" back in the day) so...yeah. Then I moved to LJ, and in a fit of dis-inspiration, kept the name. I've been Starfoozle ever since.

Okay, go, go, go!

(...On an unrelated note, Grace and I spent the afternoon developing a theoretical game rather like Pokemon. But instead of little anime monsters, you battle each other with bad/odd/iconic singers. For example, she could interrupt me using Kanye West, and I could counterattack using Lady Gaga's disco-stick-summoning powers. IDEK. We are ridiculous, but we have fun. I love that kid.)

Someday, I will have the time to just sit down at the computer and start writing the set of stories that have been brewing in my head for weeks, even months, now. They involve time travelers and wannabes and televangelists and mechanics and war correspondants and computer programs with abandonment issues and dog-things who smoke cigarettes and above all things, music.

Today, unfortunately, is not that day. *sigh*

But. I have a writerly request. For any of you who have ever been to Berlin, Los Angeles or Las Vegas, please to be telling me about them? I want to set specific stories there, but I have never been, and one can only learn so much from Wikipedia. I'm looking for impressions or random notes from the field, sort of, rather than any sort of traditionally important information. It's for science! ...Or, I suppose, in this case, for art!

I'm feeling seasick again
The whole world could just dissolve
Into a glass of water."

(Okay, enough with the song lyrics. It's storytime.)

Tonight is unseasonably warm. After getting tired of studying 50+ pages on DNA replication (ouch) I decided to go out on the back deck and do some astronomy. I'm still participating in PARI's lunar impact program, but haven't actually sat out and made observations thanks to general madness and Darth Real Life. I figured taking a few pictures of the moon would be a nice study break.

Slight problem. Moonrise isn't until 11:17 tonight. That's okay, I figured. I can set up the scope and camera mount in advance, and maybe do a little stargazing in the meantime. So I got my gear, and I got my chart, and I stepped outside.

Slight problem. There were hardly any stars to be seen.

You see, I now live in the Industrial North. Pollution, both chemical and (in this case) light, is almost  constant. To make matters worse, I live on top of a giant hill overlooking an industrial park, a freeway, a field of radio antennas and some general suburban sprawl. There's so much residual brightness in the air that most stars are completely erased. I couldn't even recognize the constellations overhead because so many of their component parts had been obliterated. I counted maybe six visible objects, including Jupiter, from where I stood, and it dawned on me that things weren't exactly working out as planned.

I could have given up, gone back in, and called it a night. Instead I pulled up a deck chair and watched the lights that were giving me trouble in the first place.

Our backyard is heavily wooded, but most of the leaves are gone now and you can clearly see the valley below us through the tree branches. During the day, it's a dull gray maze of industry and suburbia, but at night it looks like a thousand little votive candles. Streetlights are different shades of bronze in different neighborhoods, apparently. You can watch the warning lamps on the antennas blink on and off, out-of-sync with one another, and you can watch the tiny red-yellow-green pattern of stoplights attempt to moderate the endless cycle of traffic. Sometimes a train will go by, and the rumble of the cars is apparent even a few miles away, thanks to the weird acoustics of this hill.

I've got a few lines from The Unforgettable Fire -- "these city lights/they shine as silver and gold" -- that play on a loop in my head whenever I look out here now. Some day I'll have to try to take some pictures of it for you guys, but I'm not sure they can do the scene justice. Disruptive and plan-foiling as it is, at night, it's actually pretty beautiful.

So, no stargazing tonight, or probably any other night I'm at the house. It's okay. There are places around here away from the light pollution -- there's an amateur astronomer's group that meets at the local observatory (apparently there's one not too far away) that I might check out in the near future. For now, I've gotten tired of complaining. Instead, I think I'll just enjoy the view.

...I can't always get what I want. I guess the important thing to remember is that what I have instead isn't so bad after all.

I've always been sort of fond of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but after seeing this music video, I think I want to be their new collective BFF. This is the most awesome kind of crackiness EVER, and brings endless lulz.

(The real thing starts at 0:58.)

You guys, I need a serious writerly pep talk and/or some advice.

Currently I'm supposed to be writing college essays. Now, usually I'm great at essay-writing. Allow me to be arrogant here for a moment, but I can crank out something decent in an hour, and something beautiful in two hours, if I need to. But not this time. Oh no. I appear to have hit a wall.

For the last week, I've been struggling with four admissions essays. Something's gone horribly wrong, because while I have decent outlines for all of them, I simply cannot finish/edit them into shape. I don't know where exactly the fatal error is, but I can't seem to pare down what I need to say into what's essential and cut out the extraneous crap, if that makes sense. I keep trying to add things, feeling like I've missed a point and maybe that's why it's no good, but at this point they're all like over-frosted gingerbread houses threatening to collapse under the weight of various gumdrops when what I was really going for was a single gingersnap. Ugh, gag me.

So, dear writerly flist, how do you cut the crap, or at least motivate yourself to soldier on through it? Is there some secret to rebooting and re-energizing essays that are in the process of flopping? Am I just overthinking all of this? Deadlines approacheth rapidly, and I need to do something other than stare at a blinking cursor at the bottom of a cluttered page for hours on end. Which is what today has amounted to, really.

...Fuuuuck.

I've spent the day listening to U2's nineties albums on repeat as I work on college essays. On Zooropa, the last track is called The Wanderer, and it's great, but has this horrible...thing...that happens at the end. There's like a thirty-second dead space after the song ends, and then this terrifyingly loud siren starts blaring for another twenty seconds and scares the shit out of me every single time. Why they felt the need to put that on the album, I don't know, but it's so unexpected and kind of awful that I nearly jump out of my skin every time I hear it.

...So what I mean to say here is that I've actually spent the day listening for that silence at the end of the song, and then making a frantic dash to the CD player in the family room to try to change the track before the siren comes back. Mom and Grace were in the room when it went off at one point, and they both flipped out momentarily, which was pretty hilarious. At least I'm not the only one.  *grins*

Okay. Back to work.

Oh, you guys. I have the distinct feeling that this is gonna be one hell of a week.

*fastens seat belt*

EDIT: Damn. Now possibly dying of swine flu. As if I needed more to stress over. *makes gallons of tea, pulls seatbelt tighter*

Here, have a story. It would appear I've decided to give that ancient U2 Songfic Project thing another go. *grins*

(Follow the fake cut to that one writing journal I made forever ago and never update anymore)

Mostly I'm putting it up there because it's the outline of someting bigger and better (i.e., illustrated) that will apear here in the future. I'm kind of excited about it, but the real trick is finding the time for what I wanna do with it. Damn these college apps.

Now, I'm off to make an arc reactor for Superhero Day tomorrow.

...At first I thought it was just a general sense of contentment and goodwill-towards-all-mankind left over from the concert last weekend, but I've come to realize that in the past week, life has actually started to feel normal here. I never realized how important that could be.

Anyway, this weekend was pretty interesting. Took a college tour of Vanderbilt (pretty cool), but also managed to meet up with my old best friend from elementary school, who currently goes to Vanderbilt (even cooler). I hadn't seen him in years and years because his family moved away to Tenessee, but it was strange and entirely awesome. He's exactly the same as I remember (if not a bit taller, haha), and we started reminiscing about the weird stories we used to tell each other on the bus rides to school, and the Pokemon video game we'd play at his house, and the walking trails and the perpetually-broken bridge in our old neighborhood. It seems long enough ago that I'm currently feeling worthy of 'old geezer' status. Like I said, very strange, very cool. It's always neat to meet up with old friends.

Also -- brief, funny story here -- we stayed with said old BFF's parents overnight while we were in town, and they were having some other friends over for dinner. One of the guests' daughters was a girl my age, and so we made some slightly awkward small talk over dinner, as strangers in the same peer group are wont to do -- until someone mentioned Lost. We both perked up. We both noticed eachother perking up, and asked in unison, "You watch it too?"  ...We spent the next half-hour in the kitchen eating brownies and intensely discussing the relative merits of Richard Alpert, Ben's moral failings, Jacob+Esau, the Smoke Monster, and the badassity of Mr. Eko, and just about every cracked-out theory in between -- she is as rabid as I am. Ahahaha, so much win. Apparently fandom is a recipe for instant friendship. *grins*

So, overall, a pretty good trip. I am, however, disappointed that I somehow went to Nashville and didn't see a single Elvis.

Okay, to make this rambling, rather pointless post worthwhile, have some music. I have been absolutely obsessed with the remix of U2's "I'll Go Crazy" since I saw the weird techno rendition of it in concert. It is so different from the original song, but punchy and bouncy and kind of addictive. A particularly awesome person sent me the real thing plus a concert bootleg, and I thought I'd continue spreading the love. Heeeere. :D

Soooooo. I'm back, and still basking in the fangirly afterglow of the Best. Weekend. Ever.

( Cut for spaz-flailing, picspammage, and me freaking out over middle-aged rockstars. )

So, yeah. Could I possibly get any more long-winded? That's quite enough, I think. :P

TL;DR -- Concert was awesome. Hanging with friends was awesome. College touring was awesome. The whole trip was -- dare I say it? -- magnificent. :D

Home from U2 concert/friend-reunion/raves. Full report tomorrow. I am simply worn out from too much awesome in one weekend.

 
This will be me as of tomorrow. Except I'll have:

+ Two sketchbooks/notebooks/journal-things
+ One copy of Jane Eyre (unopened)
+ One U2 ticket (!!!)
+ One small Jack Shepherd action figure
+ One camera, about to be very badly abused the entire weekend.

I'm headed back to North Cackalacky for college touring, a U2 concert (pray it doesn't rain, please!!) and friend-bonding time. It should be pretty epic. Expect a full report when I get back on Monday! *love*

I just spent the past 20 minutes trying to glue fourteen pairs of legs back onto a dead centipede for my Zoo project.

What is this --

I don't even --

GODDAMN FUCKING CENTIPEDES --

I give up.

Anybody else tuning in to Flash Forward tonight? *excited*

EDIT:

*BLINKS*

...SKLD;FA'SD;LKFA'S;DFA'SDF, THIS SHOW IS GOING TO BE AWESOME.

(Also, hai thar, Oceanic Airlines poster in he bckground. I see what you did there.)