I went and watched The Marriage of Figaro with Minnie, Darby, and Yi-Lin tonight. I was a little hesitant to go at first, cuz the only other experience I'd had with opera was when I went to see Madame Butterfly for a school field trip back in like elementary school. I remember thinking that it was pretty boring at the time, hahaha. Well anyways, Marriage of Figaro was much more amusing. I dunno if I'm just more mature and appreciative of this kind of thing now, or if it was just more fun cuz it was a comedy. (It actually was pretty funny.) I had thought that it'd be a "comedy" in the sense that Shakespearean comedies are "comedies". (I tend to miss most Shakespearean humor unless I watch it performed.) I guess like with this, even if you don't really catch all the wit of the singing/dialogue or whatever, there's still a good bit of physical humor in the performers' actions and whatnot. Anyways, it was a very positive experience overall, and now I'm not nearly as hesitant to go to another opera anytime soon.

Bacon. I remember as a kid, my mom, my brother, and I would get up early on weekend mornings and make bacon on the griddle. (I was always mystified and frustrated why bacon wouldn't stay flat when you cooked it.) I used to looooooove bacon as a kid... or rather, I used to love bacon fat, haha. I used to think man, this WHITE stuff is DELICIOUS, but what's the deal with this stiff RED junk? hahaha. Ah, ignorance is bliss. =P Yea, I was kind of a chubby kid back in my day (and continue to be, haha). But yea, at some point, my brother clued in to what fat was and stopped eating it in such blatant forms. I wasn't really sure what I was doing, but wanting to be like my brother, I followed suit. I guess that's how/why I got into the habit of like trimming fat off of my steaks and stuff and not eating a lot of Chinese dishes. Yea, it took me several years before I rediscovered how delicious pure fat can be, hahaha. I've been in a love/hate relationship with saturated fat in all its forms ever since.

Filtered Vodka. I came across this site about filtering alcohol a couple months ago and had been wanting to try it out. Well, I finally got around to it and I got mixed results. I tried it a couple weeks back with a bottle of Svedka (my favorite medium grade vodka); I filtered it through about 7 times, and it came out incredibly smooth with almost no aftertaste... it could almost have passed for Grey Goose. Then this week, I tried this filtering thing again with a bottle of Polar Ice (slightly cheaper). This time, it didn't work out as well. I did a controlled experiment and compared a triple filtered sample with a control (unfiltered) and found that the control actually tasted better. I was baffled. I concluded that I probably saturated my filter with all the junk I'd filtered out of previous batches and was ending up washing it back out into the vodka the more I was doing it or something. I dunno, I wanna believe in the magic of that first taste, when Brita really did make vodka better. Anyways, try it out; if nothing else, it's an amusing story to tell.

I went and bought myself a laptop from Circuit City. It's an Averatec 12.1" for $899 after rebate. Pretty decent specs for the price I guess. (Pentium M 725 (1.6Ghz), 802.11b/g, 512Mb RAM, 80 gigs, DVD burner, 1" thick, 4.5 lbs) I've had some time to mess around with it, and I guess it performs roughly how I expected it to. My desktop is 2.6Ghz by comparison, and for the apps that I've run so far, there hasn't been that much of a difference. I haven't tried any games yet though. There's no graphics card on this laptop though (Intel Extreme Graphics doesn't count, not by a longshot), so I wouldn't expect it to be very beastly. I guess I also am not used to the keyboard; it's smaller than I'm used to, and my wrists hurt after awhile cuz the keys are lower down than I'm used to (so my wrists end up being bent at a different angle than I'm used to when typing).

So anyways, I guess the laptop's been treating me decently well except for one (big) mishap. So I was having the Moose (resident CS guy) help me make the laptop dual boot with Linux. So we first tried the Fedora build, but it kept giving us "kernel panic". We gave up on that and tried Mandrake; this didn't really work either. At this point, we'd already wiped the restore partition that comes stock on the laptop, in case you jack up your comp. (I could rant about how I hate restore partitions, but I'll save that for another time.) So I used a Windows XP disc that I'd bought at the Campus Computer Store. It installed and everything, but then it wouldn't boot. We tried to do it all over again, but the computer wouldn't even boot up anymore- not with windows cd, not without, not with partition magic cd, not with linux cd's, nothing. So we certifiably killed the computer while trying to install Linux. I packed everything back up in the box and took it back to Circuit City and told 'em it was giving me hardware problems, and they swapped it out for a new one, heheheh. (They asked surprisingly few questions.) This time around, I said screw the Linux. To this day, we still have no idea what the hell went wrong (Moose said maybe the BIOS was bad or something; I personally have no idea).

Sweet Dreams are NOT Made of This. Recently, I've been having this recurring theme/event in my dreams where my teeth fall out. I've had 2 or 3 dreams where I lose like all my teeth, and several more where I just lose like one. In one dream, it started with my teeth falling out, and I kept spitting out tooth fragments, and eventually it turned to me spitting out sea shell fragments, trilobites, and all kinds of other fossils... weird. Then another time I had all of 'em fall out, I woke up with my pillow saturated with drool.

I dunno, anyone know what teeth are supposed to mean in the (Freudian?) language of dreams or whatever? Like you know how flying is supposed to symbolize sex? Yea, I dunno, maybe it means I'm afraid of losing something I take for granted, or maybe I'm afraid of getting old... or hell, maybe it's my conscience telling me to brush my teeth more, hahaha. I also had a dream recently about my hair falling out... not sure if it was related or not.

*So according to DreamJournal.org, "The loss of a tooth often relates to feelings of loss about a person, or in general. But if many teeth fall out in some way it indicates your worries about your appearance, or links with the saying, 'I'm losing it'. It may also be about fears of aging and death." ...hmmm, sounds about right to me.

I finally got around to attending the annual Cockrell Scholars dinner this year tonight. It's a dinner to honor the recipients of the engineering school's most baller scholarship (that I know of). I'd missed it freshman year cuz of an SGT fireside, and I missed it last year cuz of ballroom dance class. Anyways, the food was pretty good I guess, but I guess I'm just not that keen on do-it-yourself Mexican food; I'm just not good at wrapping I guess. But yea, the dinner was good for giving a very human side to the money that I've come to take for granted. If nothing else, I guess I learned that apparently scholarships don't grow on trees. =P

*I watched Sin City at the Alamo Drafthouse last Friday night. I liked it; it was practically identical to the comics, just minus a couple scenes. I guess my only criticism would be that they tried to tie together 3 stories that aren't really all that related, and it starts to drag cuz it's not interconnected well. The stories themselves are good though. A very stylish movie, very noir.