Leap Year; or, I don't understand you people

Well, today is Leap Year...um...Day. February 29th. And every time Leap Year happens, I feel a little sad because everyone is so blase about it. Like, today's Leap Year, but I came to work like I do on Fridays, and everything was pretty much business as usual, everyone wanted coffee, compiling of databases, urgent tasks to be taken care of – and, you know, like that. Work. Like any Friday.

But! What everyone seemed to have forgotten! Is that it is LEAP YEAR DAY.

Seriously, this is a whole extra day. A whole extra free bonus day that we just get every four years, like a big cool tetrannual present from the god of time. How cool is that? It's a bonus day! It's miraculous! Every year there are 365 days, but this year, this year there are 366. So I don't understand how it can even be possible that anyone can just hang out and not notice the fact that this day, this day that we are having right now, IT IS A SURPLUS DAY. I don't understand how I'm on the perpetual verge of spontaneous internal combustion with glee while everyone else is just going about their business like nothing special is happening.

I've always felt that Leap Year Day should be a holiday. It's a complete miracle of a day, and it only comes around every four years, so we should totally have it off. That would be very cool. And it could be, like, the hanging out day. On this day everyone would just hang out and do fun stuff. You could dance in the streets and go have picnics (in Louisiana we could anyway – for once I'm bragging about our weather, which is cool and was sunny yesterday and will be sunny again on Tuesday), or if it was rainy/snowy, you could stay inside with blankets and popcorn and sour Gummi-Worms and have a Buffy the Vampire Slayer marathon.

Or, um, whatever. Doesn't have to be that. People like different things and all.

(Mm, sour Gummi-Worms.)

(Sidebar: I called my friend Diwen and told her about Buffy the Vampire Slayer and how I have a very big crush on Angel, and she (ever-critical even though she had just finished telling me a story in which she met Sean Astin and completely failed to be cool by asking him many probing questions about working with Orlando Bloom (Diwen's big crush, neither as badass nor as broody as Angel, nor possessed of as good a coat), and then inquiring about his (Sean Astin's) daughters like she was their old baby-sitter instead of a total random-ass stranger) said "Are you serious? You're too late. You're like ten years too late. Everyone had a crush on Angel in seventh grade. Loser." But I asked my other friend Megan, with whom I also went to middle school, and Megan affirmed what I remembered, that in seventh grade the girls had crushes on girly boys like Jonathan Taylor Thomas and the Hansen guys, not on Angel the Nice-Jacket-But-Not-As-Nice-As-Mine Vampire. Except me and my sister. We had a crush on Judas Iscariot. We vowed we would never give ourselves to any other. Mm, he was so yummily angsty.)

Point is, this Leap Year apathy, it has to stop. Everyone just has to snap out of it. This is an EXTRA BONUS SPECIAL PRESENT DAY.

WOW.

Er, that said, I'm working all day today and then studying for my English midterm. Not celebrating. But if I'm very virtuous and get enough stuff done, then I can watch some episodes of Angel (I got it from the library to make it possible for me not to watch Buffy until I could watch it with my dear sisters) while writing my story. Yay. And then tomorrow if Anna is agreeable we are going to have a HUMONGOUS BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER MARATHON WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

My paper's four-fifths done; or, why the star-chart policy should never have been discontinued

So I fell like a ton of bricks and totally unexpectedly for David Boreanaz in Buffy the Vampire Slayer – seriously, how old am I, twelve? I am usually very unimpressed by these tormented vampires, and even though I liked Con in Sunshine I'd have definitely gone with Mel, given the choice, because he is serene and nice and would surely give up his motorcycle if I asked him very sweetly. But anyway I have a big crush on Angel, and what with that and Joss Whedon's being generally brilliant, I have been watching a lot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer over the past few days. Hence the no posting at all. I kept justifying it to myself by being all, Oh, I'll just watch it while I'm studying for logic or my classical studies class, and then when I'm done with that, I'll turn it off; but what happened was that the studying would turn out to take much longer than I had anticipated and then I wouldn't get to bed until two in the morning.

This weekend, however, it has been very important for me to get some work done. I have a lot of crap to do this weekend, like my paper for English, some other smaller papers for my other English class, an oral presentation preparation that includes watching a movie and reading a book, my federal and state taxes, a big batch of cookies, all my homework for next week, my personal statement that decides my whole future, a confirmation thing, and sufficient exercise at the rec center.

(It makes me tired just looking at all that stuff.)

Let's just say this was never, ever going to happen while Buffy the Vampire Slayer was around. It went into seven seasons, and my sister owns them all, and furthermore it spawned a spin-off show that is only about Angel, and that went into five seasons, and the public library owns them all. None of this is as good as Firefly, but whatever. If I had Buffy and Angel around this weekend, I imagine I would have done my taxes, the confirmation thing, maybe the exercise if I felt like it, and my homework for classical studies and logic, which I can do in front of the TV. The papers and the oral presentation work, not so much. The future-deciding personal statement, very very not so much. So I brought all of Buffy over to my house and gave it to my mum to hide from me.

And guess what? I've done – well, not four-fifths, two-thirds is a better estimate – of my long paper, made the cookies, read a whole bunch of Walden and written one of the three papers on it that I'm going to have to write, and gone to the rec center. And washed my hair.

When I was a little girl, and I did something naughty, my parents would take something away from me that I liked a lot, like desserts or movies or lying on my bed during the day, and I couldn't get it back until I'd been sufficiently good for a sufficient period. The Evil Things were called star-charts, and what they were, were these papers with each day broken down into morning, afternoon, evening, and bedtime, and for each time period that I was good, I got a little star in that spot on my star-chart; and if I got a prescribed number of stars in a row (say, seven or eight), then I got back the thing I liked a lot. It was an excellent incentive to behave well.

Giving Buffy to my mother is much like that. This English paper is not in fact due until like – I don't know, definitely not before Thursday of next week, so I could put it off for a long time, but as long as I haven't done it, I can't have the DVDs back. So I've written a ton of it today, and I promise you, it's not because of inherent scholastic devotion. I've just been cruising along writing paragraph after paragraph like a martyr of heavenly virtue, because I really, really, really want to get to watch Buffy some more.

As you can imagine, this is pretty humbling. I think of myself as a good student: I do well on tests, I write reasonably good papers that get reasonably good grades, and teachers write me favorable recommendations when I ask them to do so. But I have never gotten so much of a paper done in so short a time: I've been up since nine, in which time I've watched Oliver! (longish movie) and read some critical essays regarding Nancy's death (not very useful, as it goes), gone to the rec center and done a thorough workout, washed my hair, brainstormed a bit and invented a thesis, and written four pages of paper. All because I want to get Buffy back from my mum.

Plus, I was at my house yesterday, and it was kind of lame how soon I cracked. I gave my mother the DVDs and told her under no circumstances must she return them to me unless I could put my completed English paper in her hands; she hid them; and maybe, I don't know, maybe twenty minutes later I was already trying to convince her to give them back to me just for a little while.

I'm really not sure I deserve to live any longer. Robyn isn't even with me on this, and we usually share our tragic TV addictions. I feel so alone. I'm making a star-chart now.

Well, it's official

I just fell in love with Angel.

I DO NOT HAVE TIME FOR THIS. I have things to do! Papers to write! Books to read! A novel to finish! Leave me alone, Joss Whedon!

(Feels like a long time since I got out the Unreasonable Crankiness tab. I always feel so justified, and Robyn and Marie do nothing but validate me.)

Splurge

Well, all the hoarding of my Bongs & Noodle gift cards is at an end. I've been hoarding them pretty well since Christmas – I bought and returned Special Topics in Calamity Physics and Atonement, but that doesn't count – and today I spent most of them. But money well-spent, I think, and now there will by joy in my heart.

I bought the following:

Vampire Weekend's CD. I've had "Oxford Comma" stuck in my head ever since Neil Gaiman mentioned it on his blog a little while ago, and I've been thinking for a while that I should do something radical and buy a CD. I haven't bought a CD since Phantom of the Opera when I was about, I don't know, thirteen maybe? But I wanted to support Vampire Weekend because I like "Oxford Comma" a lot and because they are an indie band (hooray for that!) and because they are cute, like children who are still deciding whether or not they want to be collar-popping sorts of people or tattoo sorts of people.

The Go Fug Yourself book. Oh, how I love that website. I love it to pieces. I discovered it a few years ago, when I was still working at Co-Op, and it has been an ongoing love affair since then. And now I have it in book version!

A book called Forever by Pete Hamill. I tried to get it from the library when I went today, and they didn't have it. They didn't have it in Fiction so I went and looked it up in the catalogue, which claimed that it was in Large Print, so I went over there with my conscience saying "You shouldn't take books from Large Print when you can read just fine! You should leave those for little old ladies!" and the other part of my brain assuring my conscience that the little old ladies didn't want this book and if they did it was just too bad. At which God promptly reached down His sacred hand from heaven and swiped it from the Large Print section. I even got a librarian to come help me look for it. No good. It was gone, gone, gone. Two other unfortunate things happened in the library (see below), but anyway I really wanted to read Forever – it's about a guy who can live forever as long as he never leaves Manhattan, and it's meant to be very swashbuckling – and I went and looked at it when I was in Bongs & Noodles, and then I saw that the main character, he has the same birthday as the main character in a story I'm writing, and – as with the story I'm writing – this is a relevant point to his family. (It is also my extremely cute little cousin's birthday, and he does things like include "gnome hats" in his school lists of things that are cone-shaped.) So sign from God. So I bought it. Fingers crossed.



You want to hear what happened at the library? Well, first, in the grand tradition of male librarians JUDGING US, the librarian who was checking us out JUDGED US. Robyn and I were talking about voting, and how important it is, and how much we admire her friend for being proactive about registering all their friends to vote, and how chagrined we are that a very, very smart friend of ours declined to vote in the primaries, and anyway the librarian said "I guess you two support Obama or Clinton?"

And I said, "McCain supporters also want people to vote. Everyone wants people to vote."

And he said, "Nah, it's just your age. I figured I was safe."

You know what I hate? When people tell you you're only liberal because you're young. Nuh-uh! Shut up, librarian-stupidhead. If you can't recommend other books that we might like based on our present selections, don't say anything at all!

The other thing was way more of a bummer. Today in the library I was walking through the adult fiction section, and a string hit me in the face. In actual fact it was the string of a sign that used to hang there and I guess had fallen down, but when I felt it on my face my brain just immediately assumed it was like in Albertson's where they have balloons floating around in certain areas and the strings are just dangling down and you can pull them down and buy/play with the balloons. So in my mind I was like, "Oh hooray! A balloon! This is so unexpected!", and I reached up and pulled the string to get the balloon.

But no balloon. It was such a let-down.

What my flatmate is doing for Valentine's Day

No, it's true. She and two of her friends are watching Raw. Because when I think lovey dovey Hallmark holiday I think bisexual chauvinist assholes doing stand-up comedy.

People who give up sweets for Lent

You people who give up sweets for Lent, I'm calling you out, because I think that you are plainly insane. Stephen Colbert, I think you are a cool guy and I couldn't be more grateful for the way in which you are representing cool Catholics everywhere, but I also have to say that giving up sweets for Lent is weird and perverse.

I consulted my catechism –

Sidebar: I got a free catechism! For free! Merely for getting confirmed! Hell, I don't even have to get confirmed – they've given me the free catechism already, and you know, if I wanted to, I could just take the catechism and run. Sell it for a profit on eBay. I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, it's very sweet and trusting that they're just handing out catechisms like free condoms to all comers (teehee); but on the other hand I think they should be aware of the risks they're running, giving free stuff to people without any sort of screening process to make sure the recipients aren't fundamentalists disguised as Catholics on a mission to can acquire enough catechisms for a state-wide book-burning.

– well, I consulted my catechism, and it says that Lent is an intense moment of the Church's penitential practice, and therefore particularly appropriate for voluntary self-denial such as fasting.

Screw that, I say. Self-denial seems rather purposeless, unless you have some other end in mind than just telling the Lord that He is more important to you than candy. Because I guess that's nice for a deity to hear, but like, I can think of things that would please me more, if I were a deity.

I should probably not be saying "screw that" to my shiny new catechism. It would be awful if the Top Brass in the campus church found my blog and decided I was nothing like in a state of grace and could not ever possibly be confirmed in their church. I have a lot of anxieties about this whole confirmation business, because I think I may be a heretic as well as being an apostate on account of not liking the Pope.

Okay, so not "screw that" but "fooey on that". I think it is a much better and more holy and virtuous idea (I'm all about being holy and virtuous, as those of you who know me will recognize) to use Lent as a time to become a Better Person. Which is what I am doing by giving up lying to people about shit I don't want to do. Whereas people who are giving up sweets will just get cancer and high blood pressure because they haven't eaten enough dark chocolate; and come on, people, how is that making Jesus happy?

That's right. It's not. If you have any further questions about this, I direct you to my message to the world.

My message to the world

Sorry you had to find out this way.

P.S. I love that website.

Don't be sad, England

Disclaimer: This really isn't to say that I don't love, love, love England. I completely do. I miss it terribly, darling England, darling England and its lovely public transportation systems and its beautiful daffodils (Wordsworth was not interesting but he had a point) and its yummy pasties and its London, London, London, London, London, and my uni and my flat and my lovely flatmates. All of these things I missed.

But, in spite of the truce I declared with English rain, I was never entirely reconciled to the loss of the magnificent thunderstorms that England never had (but I was only there for nine months and I was only in one spot of England and I'm sure that elsewhere they have massive thunderstorms but I never saw any, that's all). I am a sucker for extravagant weather. Today when I was walking through the quad I felt exactly like Dorothy trying to get back to the farm in the middle of the tornado. Except rainier. It was so great. I mean, okay, I was really cold, and I was absolutely drenched, but it was so cool. The wind was tremendous, and the rain was coming down in sheets, and it was very, very, very amazing.

The lady at the cafeteria today said "Louisiana sure knows how to do rain". Damn straight. (She was nice and offered me a plastic bag to shield myself from the rain, but it was way beyond the point where that would be helpful in any non-psychological way.)

The only thing, though, the only thing about these humongous thunderstorms that are so very amazingly wondrous (apart from the fact that sometimes in the autumn they are hurricanes) is that they always show up on a Tuesday, my free day for watching Guiding Light. And then the weather people want to be all "Let's interrupt the show (never the commercials) to tell you a really long bunch of information about the weather in towns where you don't live". I mean, one second Beth is screaming in agony and the next second we're being given a tornado watch for a parish in which we do not reside.

Reasons that I am happy right now

1) Voting still! I love to vote! And plus I totally feel like I accomplished something! My vote mattered for once! Hurrah!

2) I have way more Bongs & Noodle credit than I thought I have. Which means that I can do something I previously did not want to do because I was wanting to save my credit for books: I can buy the Vampire Weekend CD that has "Oxford Comma" on it and see how the rest of the songs are. (I never buy CDs. This is weird for me.) And I can buy the new DVD of Les Miserables when they release it later this month. I love Philip Quast. I saw him in Evita (yay!) Every time I think about this and tell myself that I would rather spend it on books (which is sort of true but harder to do because I have to give book-buying a lot of thought), I remind myself that there is a massive book fair coming up in March.

3) There is a massive book fair coming up in March! I prepared for it yesterday by purchasing two (2) biographies of Alexander Woollcott. Why did I do this? I really don't know. Do I need a biography of Alexander Woollcott? Do I need two? Can't imagine why.

4) The writers' strike is supposedly tentatively nearing an end! The Office is coming back! (I heard this news about the writers' strike a while ago, but I only remembered The Office this morning. I adore The Office.)

5) While searching for my voting card, I found a Smoothie King punch card with all the numbers stamped except for one, which means when I buy one more Smoothie, I will have a free Smoothie coming my way.

6) The other day I went to my house and hunted for Northanger Abbey (seriously, where the hell is my copy of Northanger Abbey?), and in the process I found a whole bunch of books I would like to read again (or for the first time), and they are now all making a clutter in my apartment. One of them is The Camelot Caper (my introduction to Elizabeth Peters, dear darling Elizabeth Peters who has read all the same trashy adventure/romance novels that I have), on which I am fondly hoping I will be able to write my term paper for one of my classes.

7) I found seven dollars, seven dollars, in a grocery bag in my room. Seven extra dollars! All mine! SEVEN.

I love voting

Well, that's it really.

I love to vote!

Yay for our democratic republic! WOOOOOOO!

Interesting side effect of using ear buds

I have often before had the experience of pareidolia, which is a phenomenon in which people find specific images or sounds in random stimuli, says Wikipedia, or more simply, that thing where people see Jesus in their pancakes, only mine is the auditory kind. If my brain is not focused on something else, and if there is a bunch of white noise, I very often hear music that is not actually playing. It's fascinating for me because I can actually sing along with it and there are harmonies and instrumentals which apparently my subconscious remembers perfectly although I can't remember them when I consciously try to think of them later.

Unfortunately this isn't really under my control. Sometimes when there is white noise I will catch a few things that sound vaguely like a song I know, and then SNAP, on goes the pareidolia in full force, and I hear the entire song and sometimes some more songs from that same album, and then after a while, SNAP, off it goes again. I think there's a certain factor of belief involved here – if it seems viable that someone nearby is playing the song I think I'm hearing, I'm far more likely to go on hearing it. Otherwise it clicks off quite rapidly.

Alas.

Because I like listening to music. It is especially soothing when I am falling asleep. And if I could do it reliably, then I would be just as cool as all the members of my family (everyone but me and my father) who see pictures when they close their eyes. In fact I would be cooler. Because music is better than pictures. And I would say, "Nyah nyah nyah, family. I fall asleep to the sounds of Pachelbel's Canon," and I would blow a raspberry, even though I am a lady and such things are usually beneath me.

Here's the thing though! It's thrilling! Since I've started using ear buds, this pareidolia thing has been happening more and more often. I think my brain has been completely taken in by the ear buds so when I am listening to music with them my brain thinks that the music is actually inside of my head. The ear buds really do produce much the same effect as this pareidolia business, except clearer and louder and more easily controllable.

So now my brain does not get all skeptical when it hears music and does not say "Well, hey, I know that sounds like 'Wrapped Up In Books', but let's look at this critically, shall we? Who would be playing Belle and Sebastian in the office and just happen to put on your favorite Belle and Sebastian song? Now, really, Jenny, is that likely?" NOW it is just like "Hey! It's Belle and Sebastian! Ear buds are keen!" and I try not to remind it that I haven't got my mp3 player with me, because THIS IS TOO AWESOME.

P.S. I'm not crazy. Just suggestible.

Things I could never ever have made up myself in a bazillion years

You know Robert E. Lee? The Confederate general during the Civil War? That guy? Well, guess when his birthday is. Okay, you give up. It is 19 January, which is quite close to 15 January, which is the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday. I include his full name with titles here because I am in love with the title "Reverend Doctor". I want to be a reverend doctor.

Anyway, you know how Martin Luther King Day is a national holiday?

Well, in three states (Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama, for the interested), they have combined – I swear to God – they have combined the celebration of Martin Luther King's birthday and Robert E. Lee's, so when they get the third Monday of January off of work and school, it's because of both these people. Martin Luther King (reverend doctor) and Robert E. Lee (Confederate general who I don't think was quite as antislavery as people keep assuring me).

So like, they are celebrating Robert E. Lee's valiant attempts to help the South secede from the North and carry on having slaves, at the same time that they are celebrating Martin Luther King's valiant attempts to bring some semblance of racial equality to the legal system of the nation.

WHAT THE HELL, COUNTRY?

P.S. I am tired of racism. Everyone needs to take their damn Confederate flags and their damn "I don't need your permission to honor my ancestors" bumper stickers and put them in a damn Racism Museum so that we can all acknowledge that the Confederate flag is an emblem of slavery and therefore really, really offensive.

P.P.S. Just because I am attacking the South for their racist crap in this particular post, that does not imply that I do not think that other parts of the country are just as racist and in fact I think that other parts of the country need to get off their damn high horse because the North is not less racist than the South even though they really love to think that they are.

P.P.P.S. This very pissed off post brought to you by: Rampant Racism in a Supposedly Enlightened Country; in conjunction with I Didn't Get Enough Sleep Last Night and I Saw A Really Aggravating Bumper Sticker This Morning On My Way In To Work.

Because I haven't said enough judgmental things about American literature in this blog yet

I still hate Wallace Stevens. So much.

But actually, for once I have something positive to say, and it is this: I love Edgar Allan Poe. I really, really do. I love his poems and I love his stories. I have no doubt I would love his literary criticism. He writes like a dream and I love him. Mr. Poe, my deepest respects to you. "The Tell-Tale Heart" is one of the most perfect stories I've ever read.

When we were in high school and we were reading Poe, I was talking to tim about how good he was and the great virtuosity of his meter, particularly in "Annabel Lee", which sounds very nicely like waves crashing, and tim made a sniffy face and said it didn't sound like that at all and in fact it was just our imagination superimposing our own ideas on the meter, when indeed no such thing was happening, and Poe was very good but the meter thing was just people being silly. And I just wanted to say for the record, I disagree with that. Hooray for Poe and his meter.

I wish he hadn't been a crazy opium addict alcoholic asshole and child-bride-haver. We could have been BFF if not for all that stuff.

An error in casting

*sigh*

Why do I always have to talk about how people got miscast? Like Eric Bana. Oh Eric Bana is not good enough to be Henry. He is not intense enough and he won't do. Cast Billy Crudup or cast Adrian Brody. Don't cast Eric Bana. He won't be good and I say no to him. The Time-Traveler's Wife is one of my favorite books of all time, and I don't want the film spoiling it.

And once again. Jude Law was a very bad choice for the part of Danny in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Jude Law was okayish but he wasn't that good, and one thing he certainly was not is a walking streak of sex. He did fine being On The Edge, but not a walking streak of sex, which is what he was supposed to be. Said John Berendt.

On the other hand, you know who is a walking streak of sex but was probably still wearing braces and trying to conceal embarrassing puberty-related problems during his classes when the film of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was made? Kevin Zegers. So too bad they didn't wait a few years to make that movie, because Kevin Zegers was born to play that part. In fact it might behoove someone to consider remaking that film right now so that they could give that part to Kevin Zegers who was clearly born to play it.

I just want to reiterate that it pains me to talk about this. It doesn't please me to have to say these things. I gain no pleasure from having to talk trash about the real life movie casters. I would much, much rather that they would make good casting decisions and spare me the necessity of making these posts, so that I could devote my entire attention to watching The Gilmore Girls.

Naughty words in songs

I have two things to say about my youth and the word "damn" in songs.

1) I have never been comfortable with lame substitutes for naughty words. If you are going to think "God damn", there is really no point in you bothering to say "Gol durn" instead. I mean, seriously, do you think that God is that easy to fool? To this end, I never ever sing the right words to "Mariah" when it says "And now I'm lost, so gol-durn lost, not even God can find me". (P.S. Yes he can. And feed you to a whale.) I always say "goddamn". And I think I will probably still go to heaven.

2) I never used to say naughty words. In fact I don't think I said a single naughty word until I was in sixth grade. Straight through fifth grade, I still got big eyes and gasped if one of my peers said a dirty word, and I was liable to find it so remarkable that I would mention it to my family that afternoon. Of course, once I hit sixth grade it was like a demon had been unleashed and I was cursing like a sailor, and this was greatly exacerbated by the nine months I spent in England where everybody curses and they even say words that we don't say here because England is just much better at cursing.

However, even in my tender elementary school years, I had been told that it was okay to say naughty words if they were part of an (un-naughty) song. Like "Someday Soon". I am extremely fond of "Someday Soon", and I always have been, and at one point Judy Collins says "He loves his damned old rodeo as much as he loves me", and I was not too shy to sing that properly. In fact, since I knew it was okay to sing the wicked word because it was part of the song, I used to sit in the very front seat of the school bus, right behind the bus driver, and sing "Someday Soon". I was kind of hoping he would turn around and say "What is this language? I am shocked, shocked, that a nice little girl like you is using such revolting words!", at which point I would say with some superiority, "Excuse me, but that is part of a song. I am not saying a wicked word, I am just singing a song. Anyone who knows anything is well aware that you can say those things if they are part of a song."

But he never turned around and scolded me. I really couldn't understand why he was so reticent. I gave him several chances. I would sing that line a couple of times over, so that in case he missed it the first time, there'd be a rerun straight away for him, but nothing. Sometimes I even sang "damned" extra loud, so that maybe he'd only hear that word, and he'd try to get me in trouble, but I would be above it because it's in a song.

I guess he knew the rule too. Damn him.