ifeelbetter

(1) I have issues with technology. So, to be clear: I am on my ten-year-old computer because my four-year-old one, the one that works....doesn't work. Not right now. And this one? It's a bit...sensitive. And prejudiced against new stuff like YouTube and sending e-mails. It actually turned itself off when I told my roommate that I missed the newer one.

(2) Doctor Who stole my heart, dipped it in rainbows and essence-of-adorbs, squashed it under a unicorn hoof, and gave it back to me.
( Learn more about my smushed heart under the cut )

(3) Hawaii Five-0, we need to have some words about that finale.
( As Jon Stewart would say, meet me at Camera 3. )

(4) I have seen. so. many. films. in the past week.
Super brief run-down:
♥ Hesher: JGL and Rainn Wilson are some sort of magic. I'm also not a Natalie Portman fan by nature--I am by practice, not nature--and she was fantastic also. I loved especially the way cliches of sentiment were raised and then twisted. If you watch the film, you'll see what I mean.
♥ Everything Must Go: If you've seen one of the (thousaaaaands) of trailers on TV recently or read the short story, you don't need to bother with the film. The film is good but uninspiring. It's a fine way to spend an afternoon but nothing to feel compelled to see.
♥ Cave of Forgotten Dreams: Honest to god, this is the best use I have ever seen for 3-D technology. It's like the damn thing has been suffering through children's films and schlock action movies for the past half-dozen years just to refine it for this purpose. That being said, I could have done with a lot less sentimental philosophizing. These are the images of a prehistoric civilization inventing art: it doesn't need sentimentalizing or philosophizing. It just is.
♥ Something Borrowed: Ginnifer Goodwin seems to have made a career of smiling through her tears. I am Not A Fan of victimhood-as-virtue for women, guys...or the assumption that women who think they are physically attractive or worth other people's time and respect are whores and villains. Not so fond of that either. I will say this for this film, though: unlike Sex and the City 2, which was so fundamentally badly constructed that it insulted the intelligence of us all, this movie was at least constructed. It had plot. It had characters. It had arch. It had no fart jokes.
♥ Thor: I LOVED IT. It is so nice to watch an action movie that passes to Bechdel test, for one thing. And Loki was doing a lot of acting. I love to see theater actors tear up a film like that--it was so apparent that Tom Hiddleston was an all-or-nothing kind of actor. No middle gears for that guy--and Hollywood doesn't always have room for actors like that. (Also--my sister said my younger-sibling issues were showing.)

I'm going to see Bridesmaids within the next couple of days. Feministing has declared that it is every good feminist's responsibility to prove to Hollywood that clever, mature, independent women exist and are legion and we will be the market for films if you just give us the credit we deserve. I can't give my two cents until I've seen it.

(5) Another year, another novel. :)
So I haven't been at liberty for the past two Novembers--grad school, my love, you do eat me up during the school year--so I have organized a small group of people to do our own Nanowrimo (or "Lo"nowrimo for "Local") in June. We did it last year--weeelll, I say "we." Only I finished. But we're trying again this year. If anyone wants to join, let me know!

That's all for me! My ancient computer hasn't shut down on me for a whole thirty minutes now, so I feel lucky. Peace!

Reading this book--which I did over the course of an afternoon--has been indescribable. I have never been hit with so many truths so solidly, so quickly. Whether you agree with her on the differences between "Western" and "Chinese" parenting (I don't) or her evaluation of either one (I still don't), this book is still the best articulation of a strand of existential angst that twines so intimately with familial love that it might as well all be one thing.

I wish my mother was still alive so she could read this book, honestly. I know for a fact her children broke her heart many times over--just as, glaringly obviously, Amy Chua's children have broken hers many times over. That much is clear--"clear," in fact, may be the under-statement of the century. But when she talks about her faith in her children's strength--and they prove her right every single time--there's some kind of recompense. I hope my mother would have said she felt the same. I hope we made up for the heartbreaks eventually.

It's also worth noting--or giving a warning about--the way cancer strikes their family. I have found it hard to bounce back from the stiff-upper-lip-ing it through that one attack, the one that killed my mother. It's been two years and sometimes I get these wells of sorrow still--I wish I had done that before, when she could still see it or She'd know what to do or something like that. Every description of a family dealing with cancer has seemed unutterably false to me. Every expression of sympathy has seemed wildly inaccurate. But this book...she got it right on the money. I'd say more on this topic...but I don't think I can. Read the book. She says it much better anyway.

As a final note, can I just stand up for second children for a minute? My sister was true to form: very diligent, very dedicated, very much on the side of the "virtuous circle" system. I am, despite an unruly childhood, her equal now. We're both on our ways to PhDs in English at prestigious Research One schools. In our family, it was the third child, the only boy, who bucked the system. In fact, I don't think middle kids rebel in anywhere near as vehement a way as youngest siblings.

So, a poll for your readerly pleasure (and my own curiosity):
[Poll #1732886]

So, Mondays have not been my friend this semester. It involves me waking up at ungodly hours (7--I know, real people do this every day, yes, but I am a chronic insomniac and so that often means I don't sleep at all the night before), going to a three-hour seminar (that was amaaaaazingly dead all semester), office hours, teaching, more office hours (because students, bless them, are incapable of figuring out real office hours)....one long exhausting day, is my point.

I just had my wisdom teeth out and the drugs have been making me sleep massive amounts. I had just gone off them yesterday--hence, no sleep--and it turns out that my wonderfully co-operative Jaw? That wasn't giving me any issues? Decided it was time for issues. I sounded like one of the Little Rascals. It was ridiculous.

Also? Having spent the weekend sleeping, not getting any sleep was extra unpleasant by comparison. So I was a Super Giant Mess by teaching time...and I still sounded like a cartoon. So I ended early, went home, and napped away my speech impediment.

Oh, yeah. Did I mention I live in a place that decided April 18th was a good day for snow? I mean, I'm a big ol' fan of snow. In winter. Which it is not anymore. It is definitively spring. Very Spring. Not at all snow-appropriate seasonally.

And then--and this might be where your sympathy for me evaporates, if you had any to begin with--Hawaii 5-0 was not the usual wellspring of happiness it tends to be. And whatever that sitcom of horribleness is that precedes it....I hope to never have to catch the final seconds of it again. That's all I'm saying.

To sum up: :(

I expect to have my ass handed to me on Friday in an action-packed day of meetings about my pre-prospectus. THEREFORE. I am focusing on the positive: I have a trip to Denmark to meet my sister's in-laws this summer to plan (and re-new my passport for because the bugger just insists on expiring a couple weeks before we leave), I have a mountain of home-made ice-cream to convince other people to help me eat, and I have a "reading practices" interview to conduct over cornish pasties (which I must teach myself to make) tonight instead of going to the crappy prospective students party. So. Everything is looking up.

Also.

I desperately want these things....and they give me joy:
( clothes clothes clothes bookshelf...like duck-duck-goose but...different )

Also, some hilarity I stumbled upon this week:


Also. This blog of 50 Inexplicable Black & White Photos gave me a good three hours of head-scratching last night. Check it:


Lastly, my new favorite thing EVER:

So I have to go to a bridal shower in a couple of hours. The problems with this statement: (a) I almost always hate the idea of leaving my house for social gatherings; (b) it's going to be, apparently, a group of religious girls too and religious people (especially the kind who have bridal showers) and I don't usually mix; (c) UGH. What even is a bridal shower? I mean. She showers every day.

Mostly I don't want to leave my house. I find social interaction a bit difficult when I set the terms--like, I invite people I feel completely comfortable with to dinner at a place I have been to many times, and decide when it starts and ends. I still feel a bit off. I know that's not healthy or sane or whatever but there you go. I don't like leaving my house.

I think I'm going to re-phrase today in my head. I'm going over to a friend's house and, surprisingly, there will be a lot of religious people there who want to talk about how our one friend is getting married in a couple of months.

I've already blocked out that this shower was happening, like, ten times. I would literally forget about it until people reminded me. It's been going on for weeks.

BUT GUYS. We're going to play bridal-themed games. I can't make my horror into an emoticon but take it from me: THE HORROR, THE HORROR.

:(

So I was being all vainglorious and whatnot last week when I boasted about having class during the snowapalooza and nothing going wrong...and then the fall, the fall that they always tell you cometh after the pride business, that fall...happened.

( Under a cut because of my sudden post-prelims craftiness.... )

So that is my exciting tale of sickness, as told in cartoons.

PS - The title of this entry is an obscure reference to Terry Pratchett...Colon and Nobby have a conversation while waiting for a dude painting the name of a ship ("The Pride of Ankh Morporkh") to notice he forgot the "e" in "pride."

I panicked about the whole what-you're-doing-at-the-stroke-of-midnight-sets-the-tone-for-the-whole-year superstition thing and made my roommate--who had all four wisdom teeth taken out earlier this week--come with me to a friend's house so that we weren't (a) alone at midnight watching bad TV or (b) something similarly pathetic. She--my roommate--has great patience with my whims of superstition and celebrated being back on solid food by going with me to my friend's house (we call her Awesome Hair because...well, the name says it all, doesn't it?) despite the fact that Awesome Hair doesn't drink and was having a Mormon church youth festivity thing that I'm pretty sure she only invited us to out of pity.

It turned out awesome (we played a game with scrabble pieces and wordplay and my roommate and I were the only ones who drank champagne), though, and I feel like we fulfilled the obligation of setting a good tone for the new year. And then we came home and I made her watch the whole first episode of Life on Mars (reminding me yet again of my deep and abiding love of John Simms) and it was lovely.

So. Yay! If this night is predictive of the coming year, I should spend a great deal of it meeting new people and playing word games. Not too shabby, I think.

So Happy New Year's to you all!

I know a lot of people who routinely take two weeks to get a batch of papers back to students. Usually I do it in four days. It's the first time I've taken so long with a batch...and it's not like they need them back soon, anyway. That was their last academic assignment of the semester for me. They only have creative final projects left.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

PS - Students can sometimes be so adorable I want to bottle them up and snuggle them on dreary days. These creative final projects? I set no limitations, made no restrictions--they have to pitch their idea of what is reasonable to me and whether I agree or not is determined by their ability to convince. Life skills all around, right? And this one boy--who makes "duuuuuuh"-face all the time--just pitched the 36 page spy thriller he's been writing all semester and wanted to know whether he should make it longer. I would have taken 5 pages. No joke. And another kid is writing a score to a silent film version of Sherlock Holmes from 1924. And another kid is doing a fashion shoot...and another is doing performance art. I love students today.

PPS - I will keep you appraised buuuuut....one of the students is writing a kids book about the contents of the fridge trying to figure out who will be eaten for dinner. And the ketchup bottle is the detective. I bet you love my students now, too, don't you?

[edit/PPPS - I have a rule that I can only have one burger a week. You might think that's crazy--why, you might ask, do you need to have a rule like that? Do you find it that hard not to eat more than one burger in a week? Yes, internetters, I do. I find it that hard. And the one-burger-a-week rule is a vast improvement over what the rule was when it started back in first year during the first paper/finals season...then it was no-more-than-one-burger-a-day. And that was hard at first. But YES so I have this rule. And I wasted my one burger this week on bad delivery burger because grading papers sucks my brain out through my nose--that's what it feels like, OK--and I needed comfort food STAT. But it wasn't nice. And now I am burgerless until next week. Here endeth my tale of woe.]

There was a thing...whatever that thing at the homepage for lj is (writer's block or something?)...about what the books you own say about you. I have always been interested in deducting/inferring character from possessions (gee, I wonder why I reacted so positively to Sherlock Holmes) so I've gotten around to taking a look at my own bookshelves.

It's worth keeping in mind two things: (1) I am in a PhD program for literature so a lot of these are required reading from various courses and the like and (2) I am the fourth person in my immediately family to get a PhD in lit. A lot of my books are shared out between my parents and my sister. So you'd have to look at the collective pool and...that would be frickin' MASSIVE.

( Let's look at books! ... or something that sounds more fun. )

Conclusions?

....I have no freaking idea.

I am leaving at the ass-crack of dawn (read: "7:00 AM" for hyperbolic-free version) for the LONGEST train trip to get to a conference. There will be a four hour layover in Chicago just cuz Amtrak loves me like that.

Then...on Friday...I am doing my very first paper presentation. I waver between being deathly afraid of absurd things (not wearing pants accidentally, misquoting someone who turns out to be in the audience and pissed, that sort of thing) and madly excited. That, and my insomnia has come back. So. Mostly, I am perplexed by the insanity wandering around inside my head.

So. Best case scenario: this turns into the Best Conference of Ever and I am thrilled by everything that happens for the next four days. Worst case scenario: I forget to wear clothes while reading the paper and someone yells at me.

There are, I'm sure, plenty of more reasonable expectations to be had but I haven't had more than a few hours sleep each night for, like, a week or something and I seem to be stuck in hyperbole mode.

I leave you with this completely tangential and unrelated question: how badass is the lady in this music video on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being Starbuck?