There are more people on campus who know me than who I know

Today is a day to honor the Pleiades, the seven daughters of Atlas (dude who holds up the sky on his shoulders) and the nymph Pleione. They were placed in the sky as the constellation that we know as the Pleiades.

All the Pleiades were important to lineages. Maia, the eldest, was the mother of Mercury/Hermes, the messenger god, by Jupiter/Zeus. Zeus also banged Taygete who mothered the first of the Spartan kings, and Electra, the mother of the ancestors of the Trojans. Meanwhile Poseidon bedded Celaeno and Alcyone, who was the grandmother of Orion (the constellation), and Ares made Sterope the ancestress of the royal families of Elias and Mycenae.

This part of mythology always reminds me of the Biblical/Judaic "begets." You know, so-and-so beget so-and-so, on and on.

Anyway, the last of the sisters, Merope, married a mortal (as opposed to just shagging a god without the whole marriage thing) and since it's a big no-no on Olympus for an immortal woman to marry a mortal man (but immortal men can marry mortal women all they want, that's fine), she was later so ashamed that when she joined her sisters in the sky she hid her face, which is why we can only see six of the seven Pleiades stars with the naked eye.

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Now, for the great revelation... I wasn't lying yesterday. It wasn't really a prank. I just wanted to see how many people would believe it was a prank if I mentioned that it was April Fool's Day. I confused my sister so bad that she's still not sure if I'm lying or not.

So, unless I'm getting pranked myself, by Bisobrina, I really am related to Mary Boleyn, and thus am descended from aristocracy.

Okay, see, I had this great prank all planned out, practically written already, except that the premise of the prank was that I was going to be all crazy uber-excited because some guy had randomly asked me out and I had a date for a change. I had two ideas to choose from-- one, have a random meet-cute in the dining hall or something, or two, have someone on Facebook hunt me down and ask me out.

Except the latter really happened, so my prank was ruined. But considering that something so radical (well, to me) that I thought it would make a fairly out-there April Fool's entry ACTUALLY HAPPENED, I'm not complaining. Then as I scrambled for an alternative Bisobrina called with a story that kinda sounds like something I would have made up anyway if I were a lot more creative. So I figured, why not?

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Blackboard wasn't working today (surprise, surprise) so I couldn't get into my UNH email account. Normally this would be just an annoyance, but I needed to know where the Bio review was tonight. Unable to discover this, I was forced to just go over to the building I knew it to be in and hope I saw someone I knew.

I didn't.

So I wandered over to the other place I thought it might be, the normal lecture hall, and there I ran into a girl I knew from class, with the same problem I had; we wandered together for about fifteen minutes before finding the room and realizing that it was empty and dark. Clearly, he had canceled the review without warning us... great...

So I'm on my own for review.

Because I SO needed this.

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WOOT! I totally had my first encounter with an internet troll today!

The only reason this is noteworthy at all is because hey, it's never happened to me before. I don't tend to get involved in controversial debates online. But yeah, someone picked up on a comment I left on someone else's blog and came to shoot insults at me, clearly just trying to make me upset. To which I say, uhm, that little trash can is there for a reason... I'll just delete the comments, over and over, and I don't get upset about it, because whoever is writing them clearly needs to express themselves and can't manage to do so in any other way than to insult random bloggers over the internet. Perhaps they should turn it into a career and take up political talk radio.

People insult me to my face and I laugh it off. Why would I care if someone insults me over the internet? Besides, I've been called a lot worse. I mean, in my childhood, I was regularly called ugly (still get called that), fat, smelly, hairy, deformed, degenerate, a wuss, a freak, a weirdo, a loser, a moron, every other word you can imagine for moron, and pretty much every variation of the above. My own mother used to only ever give me backhanded compliments. You have to get a tough skin in my family or you wind up with the self-esteem of a slime mold.

(I do not have the self esteem of a slime mold. I have the self esteem of a three-week-old grapefruit. It's very different. Actually, right now my self esteem is more comparable to, say, a female ginkgo tree, in that I know I'm important to the propagation of the species but most people don't want me around because my decaying leaves are terrible stinkbombs.

Metaphorically speaking, of course.)

So I plan to revel in the insults. My alternative is to care and thus either go cry in a corner or unleash my secret horde of undead zombies to track them down, and the last time I did that I got in trouble with the police for corpse neglect. I always forget than even zombies need feeding...

I'm just kidding. I don't have a secret horde of undead zombies. I don't have a secret horde of anything repetitious like that. I have a secret hoard of candy and Ramen noodles but I don't think that's the same thing.

Basio's an aristocrat!

Today is the Veneralia, a festival to honor Venus/Aphrodite. For this day, women removed the jewelry from Venus' cult statue, bathed the statue, adorned it with flowers, and then bathed themselves in the public baths with wreaths of myrtle on their heads. They would then ask for divine help in their relations with men.

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Guess what?

I got a call from Bisobrina today. Bisobrina's really into genealogy, which may or may not be associated with the fact that she's adopted and thus has been thinking about family a lot lately. Anyway, thanks to the wonders of the internet, she's been looking into our family's history, and apparently on my mother's side she's traced it back to the 1100's, which impresses the heck out of me.

What impresses me more is that she's discovered that I am related to the one, the only, the infamous... Anne Boleyn.

Actually, I'm related to Mary Boleyn, Anne's sister. Anne, for the less informed among my readers, was the second wife of King Henry VIII of England and the mother of Elizabeth I. She was among the reasons why Henry decided to create the Church of England (well, kinda. He would've done it for any other fertile woman, but she was the one he picked). I am a descendant of her sister Mary, who also put out for the king but who has the advantage of not having been beheaded before she was able to produce more than one kid, who, I might add, remained unmarried.

Anyway, yes. My grandmother to the umpteenth power put out for a king who banged and beheaded her sister. Shrewd and I were wondering if that makes us genetically loose women. It's possible. I find this theory to be AWESOME.

Winston Churchill is also related to Mary Boleyn, but the chances of the lines of descent being at all similar are pretty low. Technically he'd be at least a distant cousin, but then, technically everyone is my distant cousin, especially outside of Africa with the whole Mitochondrial Eve thing (or we're all descended from Adam and Eve for you Christians). I can technically say I'm related to Jesus. Oh my god, I'm related to Jesus! But so is everyone, so it's not nearly as cool.

I want to know how closely related to Jesus I am. That would be a great thing to discuss at parties. "You're a Jehovah's Witness? Well, speaking of Jehovah, you know his son? I'm totally the descendant of his third cousin." Okay, so maybe it would be lame. This is why I don't do so hot at parties.

Shrewd wants to discover that we are Jesus's great^5,000 neices, because that would make us the last Zions like in that movie Dogma, but I had to inform her that that's pretty unlikely and anyway, we have cousins who are younger than us so it seems very improbable that we will get to team up with Kevin Smith, Jason Mewes, Chris Rock and Salma Hayek and have adventures fighting demons in a race to stop Matt Damon and Ben Affleck from unraveling space and time.

No matter how awesome that would be.

Anyway, I may not be related to Jesus, but I am related to the slutty sister of a slutty beheaded woman. My genes ain't divine, but they sure have a lot of royal promiscuity in them.

Okay, I'm gone now. Just one more thing:

HAPPY APRIL FOOL'S DAY!