ifeelbetter

So, yeah, I was bumming around this afternoon/evening--I have an absurdly early schedule on Mondays and have habitually bad sleeping practices so I am good for absolutely nothing post 5 PM on Mondays--and I was reminded of that trend a couple months back of genderswapping casts. Do you guys know what I'm talking about? This one for Inception was the one in particular that I ran into again.

And then I had my absurd thought of the day---or, more accurately, maxed out my "absurd thought" quota for the day--because my honest-to-god first thought was: Huh. Wonder if that would work on The Social Network.

I try to remember there are actual people who are not the movie actual people--and, honestly, I sort of have grown to weirdly love RL!Mark Zuckerberg since the film came out--but DUDES. Would this not be a fun exercise?

I'll go back to my corner now.

I lied. I don't have any important news. I only have this fact: the OED word-of-the-day today is "hoot(e)nanny." (I use that crazy spelling because they did it first.)

This has long since been a favorite word of mine.

My favorite moment in the definition was in the examples of usage: "Hootenanny.‥is to the folk singer what a jam session is to the jazzman." IS THIS TRUE, PEOPLE? IS THE COMPARISON JUST? I DON'T KNOW.

Also fabulous: "I love folk music, but the name ‘Hootenanny’ rather repels me."

So, in short: I am a giant dork and I love the OED like whoa. In case you are unclear on how a person can love like whoa, Mya will explain in further detail:


I have used Mya's grammatical construction more times than I can count. I think we should all just admit that she is wizard and be done with it. Because only Mya understands the value of pausing for a tap solo, right? Am I right? And, true, girl is not Gene Kelly. BUT. Would Gene have benefited from detachable pants in the middle of, say, Singing in the Rain? OBVIOUSLY the answer is "yes." Mya has wisdom for us, peoples. She has wisdom.

PS - There are reasons I should not be allowed online in the wee hours. Entries like this are at the top of the list. SORRY INTERNET.

So I have this love of television. I'm a grad student in English Language & Literature and I understand that The Thing To Do is to pretend I'm so above television and all...I knooooow. But the thing is...I really do think it's a venue for some of the greatest storytelling the last century has seen. Definitely the last couple of decades. And we are a resilient species when it comes to finding outlets for our artistic impulses and we will infest this planet with art if we don't get in our own way too often.

My point is that television is great. I have cried, I have laughed, I have done both of those things at the same time, and I have done gradations of every emotion on the spectrum between them. It is a great medium. Dickens would, if he were alive today, so be writing for television. He'd be all like, "Dudes. I liked the novels--don't get me wrong. But TV is what I'm talking about."

And of the TV shows I have loved most--and there have been some intense relationships with shows in my life (I'm looking at you, Firefly)--I have to say...Aaron Sorkin sorta kinda makes my heart strings play beautiful, beautiful melodies. In five part harmony. It is a Big Deal.

And I saw West Wing first. It will have my heart till the day I die. A good chunk of my obsession with bad take out comes from the romanticism of their late night planning-to-make-the-world-better-and-pass-me-the-dim-sum sessions. Then I saw Studio 60. I KNOW that I am nearly alone in this but YES. I love that one too. The episode where the dude who got ousted during McCarthyism comes back all amnesiacally? GOLD. PURE GOLD.

But I had never seen Sports Night. I just resisted it. I thought, nah, that can't be for me. It's about sports. And...just sports. And Felicity Huffman.

BUT GUYS. I WATCHED THE WHOLE THING IN THE LAST DAY AND A HALF. IT IS ONE AM AND I JUST FINISHED. IT WAS GLORIOUS. I FEEL CHANGED. I HAVE...SO...MANY...STRONG EMOTIONS DIRECTED TOWARDS THAT SHOW.

Just...so many. So, so many.

( Also: a product from the past week's late night sleep deprived madness. Five Reasons You Should Never Offer Me A Dictatorship. )

Yet again...this is why I need a "i make weird choices" tag. Because...my choices. They are weird.

PS -- in real life news...the presentation happened. It wasn't the best, it wasn't the worst. And I fly home--home, sweet Jersey, home--on Friday. [insert exclamation of joy that is up to the task of expressing the enthusiasm I feel for Jersey and my fam--honestly, I don't think language has caught up to my emotional state yet]

Still working on the same paper...I just read the six billionth (fourth, my god, B, you are so very hyperbolic) newspaper article by Edward H. House about Japan. I have to make a paper about them fast because I accidentally volunteered to go first on Monday in our presentations.

It was an accident like this:
( I have a tag for my weird life choices because they are so weird )

BUT YES. Back to my point. The PAPER I am writing for this Transatlantic Print Culture and Race in the Nineteenth Century course is about...almost all of the things in the title. Just a different ocean. So it's about House's articles about Japan for American readers back in New York and Boston. See how I did that?

Race? Check.
Print Culture? Check.
Transatlanticpacific? CHECK.

House's articles turn out to be pretty fervently anti-British and anti-Catholic. I called my sister--a medieval and Renaissance grad student--and asked her WTF.

"I get the anti-Catholic stuff in Britain," quoth I. "What's it doing here when the guy is also anti-British?"*

* I was raised atheist--stringently atheist-- and quasi-hippie so I say shit like this out loud and then people give me weird looks. I just. I don't get most religious stuff. It is ALL foreign to me. Also. I once had a history teacher in high school who taught the same two pages of the text book every single day for a year and then skipped to WWII. I am missing CHUNKS of history.

"You're stupid," she said (but nicer) and then explained the Puritans. In the five minutes she had to spare before she continued to fete her hubby for passing his prelims. (She has been feting him for about a week now. I called the other night and they were drinking champagne and eating burgers. Even I would not do that. They were, unsurprisingly, sick afterward.)

I'm still mostly confused and very much unsure of how this all relates back to the Reformation. She assures me it does. So I guess I'm writing my paper about re-staging the Reformation in Japan via America?

...that is so stupid. Now my head hurts.

So this friend of mine quit our English PhD program last year and was accepted to all law schools everywhere and--draaaamaaaa--ended up staying here and going to ours. Which was awesome for everyone but nail-biting-craziness for like nine months.

I was having lunch with this friend on Thursday and she was like, "so how are you ending your semester?" I assumed she was talking about next Tuesday, the day I thought would be the end of the semester. And I was--not gonna lie--more than slightly freaked out by the fact that I hadn't thought of anything sufficiently hear-swelling. And she had just finished telling me about the soaring-rhetoric of all of her end of terms classes (because you can send your students out into the world to save bunny rabbits and starving salmon when you're sending them into LAW) and I love me some soaring rhetoric. I watch old West Wing clips. I have them favorited on Youtube. My brother knows that he can never piss me off enough that a West Wing clip on my facebook wall won't make it all better.

But, no, my friend's like, "No, silly rabbit, I meant today."

And I made this face:


Because that meant I had an hour to come up with Serious Business Lesson Plan instead of the Happy Funtimes Lesson Plan I was planning to use that day.

I ended up doing a Frankenstein's Monster (yes, people, Frankenstein is the doctor) Lesson Plan in which we (a) finished the presentations I had not allotted enough time for before, (b) workshopped all their projects despite how very much they didn't need it, and (c) had a nice little Henry V inspired moment of rhetorical whatnot from yours truly.

Yeah, you heard me. I use Henry V as my rhetorical model in all things.

"We few, we happy few who learned how to write basic essays in this course, we band of brothers..."

It is good stuff.

Only--unlike training people to save all the under-represented cactii of the world or whatever you learn in law school--I only had that one trick in the bag. So it was like a fast-forwarded version of Hal but with the volume turned waaaay down. He's all like "once more into the breach, my friends!" and I'm like, "you're going to end up writing maaaaaany more essays before we let you leave this college."

Not so soaring.

That is my story. I ended class like that. And then I said "Merry Christmas." pause. "And Happy Hanukkah." pause. "And Kwanzaa. And SOLSTICE AND ALL THE HOLIDAYS I LOVE THEM BWAHAHAHA."

So there. YOU'RE WELCOME, WORLD.

Back from Thanksgiving and, apparently, not done with lists yet...still looking for suggestions for what to make a list of next.

( Top Five Songs about Friendship )

Now, I should go back to reading Contending Forces for class tomorrow or A Yankee in Meiji Japan for prelims or grading papers for Tuesday...anybody want to lay odds on me not doing any of those things?

-_-;;