I Will Tell You What to Think

The cold sting of resentment; or, I have a pencil that’s no good to me

2009-10-16T15:59:00.000-05:00

Today, I went to the insurance place for work; and on my way out, they gave me a free pencil. I like a free pencil. With a nice, new, sharpened pencil there are several things I can do that I like to do:

a. Part my hair
b. Color in the sections of the cross-stitch pattern that I’ve already finished stitching
c. Write down appointments in my appointment book that I intend to cancel later
d. Jab holes in the covers of paperback books – oh, wait, I’m not Anna at nine.

Unfortunately I can’t do any of these things because MY FAMILY BROKE MY PENCIL SHARPENER.

Yes, I said my pencil sharpener. That really excellent electronic pencil sharpener that we had in the kitchen for years and years, next to the basket with the Q-tips, that pencil sharpener that eventually broke because too many people were using it? That was mine. I got it for Christmas one year and I loved it.

When the pencil sharpener broke, everyone was like, Oh no! Now the family doesn’t have a pencil sharpener! This is terrible! and I tried to explain that this was a personal tragedy for me because it was my personal pencil sharpener, and nobody listened to me. Everyone just kept saying how sad it was that the family pencil sharpener was broken. Which was really mine all along. Just like that stapler of Robyn’s that she finally reclaimed (I think she did anyway) after over a decade of everyone pretending it was a family stapler.

My family is a stealer. And a murderer. I bet that pencil sharpener would still be alive and kicking today if I had not out of the GOODNESS AND GENEROSITY OF MY HEART consented to allow the family to use it, rather than keeping it all to myself.

P.S. This week my mom got me a flu shot and gave me cookies as a prize for allowing her to buy me a flu shot. So I guess, on balance, I am not still mad about my pencil sharpener. It’s just, I could really use it right now. Am I supposed to part my hair with a comb?

Oh heaven

2009-10-08T18:03:00.002-05:00

I am capitalizing on my sisters' absence to go crazy with incense. I have always wanted incense, but I never burned any, because I don't know, I lived with my parents, and no incense there, and then I lived at the dorms, and no incense there, and then I had an apartment with carpets, and I had this vision of ashes falling on the carpet and IGNITING EVERYTHING...

Anyway, I now have an apartment with hardwood floors, and my sisters with asthma aren't going to come visit any time soon, and I have taken this opportunity to buy incense. I tried sandalwood incense first, and that was a little too much sandalwood. I like sandalwood but it is like vampires - too much can make you gag and swear it off forever. And I didn't want to swear off sandalwood forever, or even for-temporary-ever, like I have vampires, because in fact, sandalwood smells lovely.

I went to Whole Foods to get chocolate cream pie (mmmmmmmm) and coffee (they suggest using the ENTIRE CANISTER within seven days of opening it, which I think means they're insane), and I popped by the incense aisle just to see. I figured, if they didn't have something else thrilling, I could just get more sandalwood and learn to be okay with lots of sandalwood.

So these are the kinds I investigated:

1. Jasmine. I like the way jasmine smells, but I have jasmine perfume. I don't want to be like - the jasmine girl. With jasmine-scented sheets and jasmine shampoo and jasmine perfume and jasmine incense.
2. Sandalwood and musk. It was the only other one of the brand I bought before with sandalwood in (besides sandalwood), so I thought maybe? But no. Way awful. Cannot have my apartment smelling like this.
3. Myrrh. The Wise Men were assholes.
4. Frankincense. Seriously, the Wise Men were assholes. I bet they would have sold the baby out to Herod totally if the Gold guy hadn't been like, "Look, guys, I know you want to make the baby suffer, but I feel like your gifts are enough to manage that handily."
5. Cinnamon. Just like sandalwood (my feelings, not the smell). Again, I love the way cinnamon smells, but you don't want all cinnamon all the time.

And then that was all the ones in little bags for $1.99, and I thought, well, damn, total failure on the incense front, I will have to look elsewhere. But then something GLORIOUS happened. I happened to glance down at the little boxes, and I picked one up to see what it was and dude. It was cloves and sandalwood and cinnamon.

My apartment smells so good right now. And I am about to go eat taco soup. And chocolate cream pie. And Pam and Jim are getting married.

Pigs

2009-10-07T19:41:00.003-05:00

I really want a pet pig. I have wanted a pet pig for a while. Pigs are smart and clean and they have sweet snuffly noses, but eventually they grow to an untenable size. I did not want a pig that would grow to weigh three hundred pounds, and I knew even small pigs got to be enormously one hundred and fifty pounds, so I gave up on my pet pig dream.

UNTIL NOW.

Seriously follow that link and look at the little pig babies. They are the sweetest little baby animals. They snuffle at the camera with their snuffly little baby snouts, and they wander all over the place on their little baby feet, and they are so cuddly and adorable.

I want one. Or two. Or ten. I shall buy them, and make them all comfortable at my home, and eventually I will breed them and spread happiness to the masses in the form of miniature pigs, while incidentally making money for myself. Much better idea than breeding tarantulas like a crazy person, which in one litter I believe supply would far outstrip demand and you would just end up squashing them. But nobody would squash, and everyone would want, a sweet adorable darling little pig. These little bitty ones only grow up to be about a foot tall, which is not at all big.

Yup, I’ve decided. I’m buying all of those little pigs. I will get a breeding pair and I will name the boy Wilbur and I will name the girl Wilbur too. Then they can have a litter of baby piglets and I will name them Wilbur and Wilbur and Wilbur and Wilbur and - look, I WILL NAME THEM ALL WILBUR, okay? My house will be full of adorable snuffly piglets. Then I won't even run the risk of getting eaten by cats like a cat lady, or even by Alsatians, but only by sweet adorable little pigs. (And possibly a greyhound. I wonder what a greyhound would make of a pig.)

I dreamed I was a teacher and woke up screaming

2009-09-29T11:24:00.003-05:00

Well, not screaming. But it was a terrible nightmare. I was supposed to be teaching these third-graders, but I had no lesson plans and no idea what third-graders were supposed to learn. There were two other grown-ups in the room with me, one of whom was evaluating me, and the other was the science/math teacher. So I was all, “Yeah, well, right now it’s the science and math unit!”, and I was hoping the science and math teacher would take over, and give me time to think of a language arts lesson plan; but instead she just stood there watching me expectantly. I said, “Okay, fractions!” and all the kids waited patiently and I said, “One half plus one half equals a whole. Get it?” and drew a picture of a sliced-in-half pie on the chalkboard.

“Jenny,” said the science and math teacher. “They don’t learn fractions until eighth grade.”

“No,” I said anxiously. “Third grade. They learn fractions right now. With pie.”

“It’s 3.14159 et cetera,” said the science and math teacher to the students. “Remember that, students. You will need it to decipher the circle that Jenny drew on the board for you.”

“Wait, we aren’t doing geometry!” I said.

“You brought it up,” said the science and math teacher gently.

“Not pi,” I said. “Pie like apple pie.”

“You’re being very irrational,” said the science and math teacher.

“Is this your normal teaching method?” said the evaluator. “Why haven’t you asked the students to tell you about themselves? These students don’t even know each other’s names. How can you try to teach them Euclidean [only she pronounced it Oyclidean] geometry on the very first day when you don’t know anything about them?”

IT WAS AWFUL. I woke up shaking and couldn’t get back to sleep, but I didn’t remember what the nightmare was about until just now. I thought it must have featured horrific monsters. But no. Just teaching.

This nightmare brought to you by:

1. Several of my friends becoming teachers
2. Talking to my sister about fractions last night – she was fantastically good at them when we learned them in (she says) fourth grade (but I thought we learned fractions in third) (but she remembers it very vividly and I'm sure she is right). So I was off about the fractions by a year.
3. Explaining to tim that I am bad at teaching. Also, the Oyclidean business is tim-related because she one time told me that Euler is pronounced Oiler and it always makes her want to call Euclid Oyclid. Also if it weren’t for tim I doubt that the irrational joke and the five digits I can remember of pi would have made it into this dream.

What I wonder

2009-09-25T15:57:00.002-05:00

My mother and I were talking last week about Memorable Reading Experiences, and she had all these memories of where she was, and what she was doing, and what the weather was like, when she was reading certain books. Whereas my memorable reading experiences were more me thinking, Oh, you can do that in a book. Like with Rumer Godden’s books, the way she interjects brief comments from other characters in the middle of describing an event, or that dialogue thing she does where she contrasts what one character is thinking with what another character says. Like, Jenny thought that football was dull, but, “We’d love for you to stay and watch it with us,” said Aunt Becky. I love Rumer Godden.

Or when I first read Agatha Christie, and previously the only mysteries I’d really read were Nancy Drew and the Boxcar Children, and I got to the end, and it was like, bam! You weren’t expecting that, were you? I remember being so fascinated by the idea that someone could be the killer all along and everyone else didn’t even know. (Yes, as an adult, I realize this is how mystery novels work. But Nancy Drew telegraphs its punches! So it was a new sensation to me, with Agatha Christie!)

Or – hey, I know – when I first read Sorcery and Cecilia, the idea that you could have an epistolary novel, a novel that was a proper novel but at the same time it was made out of letters (I just typed “made out of win” on accident, so you see I feel strongly about this) – well, that idea filled me with almost more rejoicing than my brain could handle. It still does actually. One of these days, my friends.

Do these examples work? I mean that when I read books, I like for writers do something I hadn’t thought of before. Unless it sucks. Like the first time I ever read a stream-of-consciousness story, I expect I was all, Blech. Where is the punctuation? Punctuation, everyone! Punctu-fuckin’-ation. (To make that remark slightly less lowbrow, let me pause and mention that it is what is referred to as tmesis, a literary device of which I have always been fond. Wikipedia gives a rather sexy Latin example. The fact that five years out from my most recent Latin class, I am still excited about tmesis in Ovid suggests to me that I maybe missed my calling to be a Latin teacher.)

Anyway, when I said this to my mother, she said, “Well, you really are a writer.” But I am not sure that the above-mentioned thing is proof of that. And I am wondering now, when a book does something nifty and new, do other people have this reaction? Where they are like, OH HOORAY OH THE GLORIOUS VISTAS OF OPPORTUNITY? Or do they not notice at all? Or do they slightly notice but not pay attention because they don’t care? Or what?

Sad

2009-09-21T11:34:00.003-05:00

The library hates me and breaks my heart. They are constructing some new system to catalogue the books and keep track of what patrons have what books out which THEY SAY is going to be much better and everyone will rejoice in it once they have finished setting it up TWO WEEKS FROM NOW. But I have my doubts because the last several new things that they have come up with have made me unhappy, to wit:

1. Completely getting rid of the computers where you didn't have to log in, you could just check really quickly to see if a book was in the library. Now you have to log in to the computers and get on the internet and use the online catalogue. It takes ages and I hate it. And the computers are constantly breaking which they hardly ever used to do. Or, well, maybe they did, but I liked them a lot better and have chosen to forget any negative qualities they may have possessed.

2. Bringing out these new soulless white cards. My card is blue, and I have had it for eight years, and I am not prepared to part with it for some allegedly stronger but definitely not as good white card.. Because when I first got a grown-up blue card, I kept losing it, and finally I got this one, and I was like, OKAY. THIS IS IT. I like this number and I am not ever ever ever going to lose this card, and I never did.

3. The new evil system whereby little children can only check out children's books on their card, so if they want an adult book or even a YA book, their parents have to check it out for them. This is hateful evilness and makes people's lives more trying. I can only imagine how furious I would have been if this rule had been in effect when I was small.

So I am not confident that the new library system will be better. Meanwhile I have no idea when my books are due. I check books out all the time, and I keep track of their due dates by looking online. You can't renew books using just your library card. You have to actually know which books are due when, and have them with you when you try to renew them. This sucks because my goal is to accrue less than $15 of fines on this go-round of my library card; I just renewed the card, and that lasts for three years, so I am trying to get very few fines in three years. And I know this is going to mess everything up. TOTALLY UNCOOL.

You know what would make me feel better? Football! How many more days is it until Saturday? I am nervous for the Florida game, but I am taking it as a good omen that it's happening on Ada Leverson's birthday. I shall pray that she intercedes for us - I mean what are the odds that there are any Florida fans who like her as much as I do?

Revisiting the slaughter policy

2009-09-11T22:54:00.005-05:00

When I was a child I thought as a child and my slaughter policy was as follows:

1. Don't kill anything cute.
2. Kill other noncute things whenever you are brave enough to do so.
3. Don't kill any spiders.

This last bit is completely Roald Dahl's fault for having James say this:

Should her looks sometimes alarm you
Then I don't think it would harm you
To repeat at least a hundred times a day:
I must never kill a spider
I must only help and guide her
[and invite her in the nursery to play]

So, okay, that's fair (apart from the last line which I have bracketed off as obvious lunacy). Spiders do helpful things, and I like helpful things. I am not necessarily afraid of spiders. I mean I do not want disgusting spider babies running all over my apartment LIKE SOME PEOPLE, but I don't see a spider and start crying and hyperventilating or anything. That's why the third item on my policy was there.

And then I became an adolescent, and grew to understand nuances of good and evil, and I revised my policy thus.

1. Don't kill anything cute.
1a. If something cute is going to die anyway you may run it over with your car as I learned when my mother had to do this to a little bird my cat was playing with.

2. Kill other noncute things only if they are in your territory. I.e., if you encounter a wasp inside, it is a villainous invader of your personal space and you can kill it because it's icky. If you encounter it outside, like an ant on a picnic, you are in its space and it legitimately has the right to crawl on you or whatever.
2a. COCKROACHES KILLED BOOKS BELONGING TO YOUR GREAT-GRANDFATHER AND EVERY ONE OF THEM MUST THEREFORE ALWAYS DIE.

3. Don't kill any spiders.
3a. However, you don't have to have them in your house. If you find one, mercifully scoop it up on a Kleenex and put it outside.

Now I am a grown-up and I have had to make changes again. Things are more complicated when you are an adult. They are. Viz:

1. Don't kill anything cute.
1a. If something cute is going to die anyway you may still run it over with your car.
1b. If you do kill something cute by accident, immediately call your Hindu friends and let them make you feel better by assuring you it's going to get reincarnated as something better.

2. Kill noncute things if they are in your territory.
2a. Or if they bite you.
2b. Or get on you.
2c. Or if you just can't stand the sight of them (this includes all cockroaches everywhere).

3. Take spiders on a case-by-case basis.
3a. Don't put them outside. If they are inside they are probably house spiders, so the house is their territory too, and putting them outside will probably kill them.
3b. So if you're inside and they're inside, and you try to ignore them and they don't take the hint and keep hopping back onto your desk and ending up on your post-it notes and finally GETTING IN YOUR HAIR AND IF A SPIDER CAN DO IT THEN SO MIGHT A COCKROACH, you can feel free to kill them.
3c. And then if you slam a pack of post-its down on them really hard and they still walk away from it, feel free to scream obscenities at them. And at Roald Dahl too because it's all his fault. And then write a stroppy blog post about it.

Dear friends and family,

This blog post is a call for help. I CANNOT STOP SWEET HEAVENLY GOD.

OH HOLY SHIT

2009-09-04T14:23:00.003-05:00

Oh my God! Look at what has happened! Look how the internet senses & responds to my every whim! Beautiful, wonderful, amazing, brilliant internet! How can it be that you care for me so much, when I have often scorned and cursed at you for running too slowly and for failing to load websites that I want? I am in a frenzy of self-reproach! Oh, internet, just tell me how to make it up to you! I will make you cakes, I will buy you jewels, I will travel to the North Pole and bring you back the head of a polar bear!

(You were doing quite well until you got to the bit about the polar bear.)

You may wonder what this is all about and DO NOT WORRY BECAUSE I WILL TELL YOU.

For a while I have had this project of trying to identify English accents. I am better at it than I used to be - obviously since going to England, but also since I've just been paying attention. Hitherto I have been getting by inspecting actor bios on IMDB when I watch British telly, which, yes, slows the progrses of my project, but not unduly, and it was the only way of managing it. I thought.

BUT LOOK AT THIS.

LOOK LOOK LOOK.

The British Library (which I have never scorned or cursed of course) (except for earlier today when I discovered that it wasn't going to let me listen to all the stuff I wanted to listen to on account of being American and not at university) has digitized their sound archives. Like including oral history. Which you can organize by county. Which means I can listen to what people sound like anywhere in Britain.

Today I listened to a dude from Cumbria who feels sad for children these days and their need for instant gratification. He actually said Bligh (is that how it's spelled?). "The dogs have nowhere to go; kiddies have nowhere to go. Bligh." He sounds a bit like the way the people in The Secret Garden talk. Except? He's not from Yorkshire. And now I can just go to the British Library website and listen to someone who IS. Whenever I feel like it.

Swear to Jesus.

I love the internet.

Preaching by the converted

2009-09-04T08:15:00.002-05:00

How come I am so much more insane about preaching the goodness of books/films/TV shows that I originally didn't want to read/watch? You notice this same thing with converted religious people sometimes, that they can be madly zealous in a way that people brought up in the faith are often not.

I bring this up because I am reading The Girl in a Swing, which is a book by the same guy that wrote Watership Down, and it's making me want to tell everyone to read Watership Down. Zealously. Though I believe when my mother first brought up Watership Down to me, the conversation was like this.

Mumsy: Jenny! I got Watership Down! You have to read it while we're here [in Maine]!
Jenny: Okay! You have never steered me wrong! What's it about?
Mumsy: Well, it's about these rabbits.
Jenny: Um, yeah. That sounds sweet, but I'm too busy revisiting the oeuvres of William Steig and Maurice Sendak.
Mumsy: Really?
Jenny: NO NOT REALLY. I AM TOO OLD FOR BUNNY RABBIT STORIES.
[Note: William Steig and Maurice Sendak are both brilliant and I love them. I am in no way criticizing William Steig and Maurice Sendak.]
Mumsy: No, no, it's very exciting. It's very exciting. It's about this rabbit that is psychic-
Jenny: Mother. This is embarrassing.

See, but I was so wrong! Watership Down is amazing and thrilling and suspenseful. The rabbits have all kinds of mad adventures, like - oo, it's so creepy - when they find this warren with these fat, well-fed rabbits that just act really weird; and like when the Major Fighter Rabbit, Bigwig, befriends this crow; and when they have to infiltrate a terrifying fascist warren and fight off the terrifying army of fascist rabbits.

When I try to tell people how good Watership Down is, I can always tell from their faces that they are thinking the exact same thing that I myself was thinking when my mother first told me about it. And I don't want them to make the same judgey-face mistake that I made! Which caused me to put off reading it for a really long time! I mean, okay, for like a week, until I ran out of other stuff to read, but dude, if we hadn't been on vacation, if we had been at home surrounded by zillions of books and a public library, I might NEVER EVER HAVE READ IT.

...I am sad for the people that have never read Watership Down.

Girl detective

2009-08-27T18:30:00.002-05:00

So today I was going through pictures of my work, right, and I found a picture in this office with a fish. In a fishbowl. And at first I was just all, aw, the leetle fish. Look at the pretty colors. Isn't it nice? La la la. I carried on going through the pictures, whatever whatever, and after a while it hit me: That is a picture of a fish on my desk. My desk does not have a fish on it. WHERE IS THE FISH?

I thought maybe the fish was somewhere else around the office and I just hadn't seen it, so I went hunting. I looked all around my desk. I looked in the meeting room area. I looked in the kitchen. I looked in the stuff room & the other stuff room & my boss's office.

NO FISH.

By now I had begun to suspect that somebody, sometime, had come into this office and played a game they called UP UP UP with the fish!, and had had poorer balance than some players of this game, and the fish in question had not had the good fortune to land in a pot full of water from which it could continue to express its dismay about the turn the game had taken. There are no pots full of water in this office so it couldn't have fallen into one, and I was growing ever more worried about the fate of the fish.

When my boss came back, I said, "Those pictures of the office are very good,"and he said, "Oh, you like them?" and I, having achieved my segue with a minimum of effort, said severely, "WHERE IS THE FISH?"

"Fish?" he said.

I would make a fantastic investigative journalist. I wouldn't let people get away with anything. I did not let my boss get away with this. "THE FISH FROM THE PICTURES," I said.

"It's gone," he explained.

"BECAUSE YOU KILLED IT?" I said.

I know, I know. I missed my calling. I should have become a journalist as previously noted, or possibly an expert interrogator. I would not need to torture people sneakily, because I would get the truth out of them using only my words.

The fish didn't die. You will be relieved to hear. The fish from the pictures was someone else's fish. Not an office fish. Not somewhere dead of neglect in this office because I didn't know about it when I started working here.

Phew.

(Mumsy, don't worry - that is not really what happened. I did not go snooping through the rest of the office, or interrogate my boss. I asked politely and he explained politely. I did not really miss my calling to be an investigative journalist or witness interrogator; I know that my true calling is to be a writer of amusing fictions.)

Changes hurt my brain

2009-08-22T22:17:00.002-05:00

Well, I mean, some changes. Today my father brought my sculpture over to my new apartment, and it's the first thing your eye falls on when you walk inside. It makes me completely happy. That is a change that does not hurt my brain.

However, this new apartment, despite its beautiful perfection, is not without its problems. I was pleased upon arriving here to find that the linen closet in the bathroom has one of those adorable little pull-down doors in it, do you know what I'm talking about? There is a handle, and you pull it down and chuck your dirty laundry inside the bottom half of the linen closet? You know?

I love this. I have always wanted one of these. (Do you know what I'm talking about?) I am much more motivated than I have ever been before, to put my dirty laundry in its designated place. I am even more motivated than I was when I was little and putting the laundry in the hamper meant my mother would do it for me. When I lived at the dorms and in previous apartments, I mostly just threw my dirty clothes in a corner close to where my laundry bag was, and then when the pile of dirty clothes got big enough that it made me unhappy, I did a couple of loads of laundry.

Now, I never see how big my pile of laundry is. I never see it at all. It's very weird and I'm having a hard time adjusting. This morning I got up and tried to find the shirt I wanted, and it wasn't anywhere. I searched in my closet, and then I searched through all the drawers in my chest of drawers, and then I searched in the pile of clothes I really need to hand-wash (I will soon!), and then I searched through all my unpacked boxes. And finally I sat down sadly and tried to live with the realization that the shirt was gone forever.

"How can it be missing?" I asked my cuddly Harrod's teddy bear, who is called Basil Bear. Baz had no answers for me. "HOW?" I cried. "I DO NOT EVEN HAVE ANY BIG PILES OF DIRTY LAUNDRY LIKE NORMAL. WHY AM I BEING PUNISHED FOR MY CLEANLINESS?"

Which is when I remembered about the pile of laundry tidily hidden behind the little door in my bathroom. Baz didn't really deserve to be yelled at (but I really like that shirt, and I am on the rag, so you can understand how this all went down).

One of those epiphanies it would have been better to have had sooner

2009-08-21T07:51:00.004-05:00

I was in high school before I realized that the phrase "to jew someone down" is a reference to - you know - Jews. For years and years and years (not because I am stupid! but because I didn't hear it that often and so I didn't think about it that much), I totally thought it was an onomatopoeic approximation of the sound of a power tool. You know, JJJJJJJJJEWWWWWWWWWWWWW - like, whittling something down. I thought jewing someone down meant wearing them down until they could take it no longer and gave you the price you wanted, or possibly wearing down the price with a power tool type thing. When I hear that phrase, that's still what pops into my head.

But then this one time I was talking to one of my friends at lunch about this girl in my elementary school who used to bring Fudge Rounds to school, and she would never share. We used to offer her huge portions of our own lunches in exchange, but the only trade she would accept was two (two!) of those yummy cafeteria rolls. I was telling my friend, "One time I jewed her down to - I just realized what that meant."

Then I felt guilty.

I just wanted to tell y'all that. I have a picture of a power tool in my head right now. JJJJJJEEEEEWWWWWW. Do you understand the noise I'm making? The J is a soft J like in Arabic or French.

Book lists

2009-08-14T21:09:00.002-05:00

I love book lists. You know, those things where it's all "50 Books You Must Read Before You Die" and "75 Best Books Ever in the World" and "100 Classics If You Haven't Read Them You Are Stupid". I was talking about this with my mum and sister today, and Anna was saying she finds them dismaying because they make her feel like she isn't well-read. As for me, I always like them and I always go through and add up my totals even if I have somewhere else to be in the next five minutes. It's fun. Here's why.

1. I often feel like I am well-read when I add up my totals. Unless they have loads of philosophy books on them, I have normally read a lot of those books. I was an English major so I had to. I had to read Moby Dick twice, and the payoff for this and other miseries is that when there is a list like this, I have usually read a bunch of them. Though I think I should be able to give myself two points for Moby Dick since I had to read it two (2) times and it is as long as - like, it's really really long, okay?

(I was trying to think of some sort of dirty joke about Pinocchio's nose, to illustrate how long Moby Dick is. And I couldn't think of something. Oh well. I am not that clever.)

2. I come across these lists relatively often, because people love to make them, and they always remind me of books I have been meaning to read. Like Doris Lessing. I keep meaning to read Doris Lessing. One of these days I will. Or, to give a better example, Salman Rushdie. I used to see Salman Rushdie's name all over the place, and I was all, Whatever, I'll get to it, and eventually, I got to it. Which means that now when Salman Rushdie's books are on these lists, I have read them. Plus, it turns out I really like Salman Rushdie. And if he hadn't been on book lists all the time, reminding me about his existence, this would never have happened.

3. This will not stand up under scrutiny given how much I thought I was going to hate Salman Rushdie and other authors I can't think of right now, but here it is anyway: for a lot of the books I haven't read, I am pleased not to have read them. Because I know I won't like them. And because I think without having read them that they are stupid. Thus instead of feeling not-well-read, and thus not enjoying the book lists, like Anna, I feel aggravated with the list-makers for putting stupid books on their lists, and pleasingly smug with myself for knowing better. And then I have a big internal (or sometimes out-loud) rant about how racist and sexist everyone is with The Classics, and how foolish the list-makers are, putting on more than one book by Faulkner (esp. if neither of them is Light in August, which is the one I was forced to read) or whoever, and that is fun because it's fun to feel like a better person than someone else.

Yup.

Unless you are Robyn, I know you don't care

2009-08-14T20:59:00.003-05:00

But Chad Michael Murray is leaving One Tree Hill. I can't tell you how much this has broken my spirit. Chad Michael Murray and his sensitive-guy-face and his better-acting-through-squinting techniques have been such a joy to me since my lovely flatmate Saz introduced me to the show in 2007. Ever since I discovered this, I have been broken-hearted. Inconsolable. Ask anyone. I have taken to my bed and refused to arise until the CW reconsiders.

However, today it came to me in a blinding flash of light, exactly what I need in order to be happy again. Nobody is planning to do this (YET!), but inventing it inside my head has made me feel much happier. Okay. I need some network to do a show about a ballet school - no, wait for it - that's a boarding school - no! no! you are still waiting for it - set before the Second World War. Ish. That's when ish I would need it to be set. I THINK IT WOULD BE GREAT.

Yes. Essentially, Thursday's Children on TV. And American.

But no, seriously, I think this would be such fun! Thursday's Children is great, and what would make it even more great would be MORE CHARACTERS AND LONGER AND IN SERIAL FORM.

Right? Am I right? Wouldn't that be fun? For me?

How to cook

2009-08-07T17:34:00.004-05:00

The key, of course, is to not cook for several months between attempts. In this way it becomes possible to forget the abject, multilayered misery that happens when you cook a new thing. Like maybe wait three months. After three months it is possible for me to tell myself that I have been exaggerating my loathing for cooking. You know, for comedic effect. So today I cooked a new chicken spaghetti thing. It looked very easy. Ho, ho, ho.

I cut up the chicken first. This went really smoothly, despite my hatred for touching raw meat, and I was feeling fantastic about myself and my cooking abilities, so I bravely went ahead and put the olive oil on to heat up. I didn't know olive oil had to heat up. I would have totally dumped the chicken into the skillet first, piece by piece as I cut it up, and worried about the olive oil when I started cooking the chicken.

Then I chopped up the garlic. I figured, since I had already cut the chicken successfully, theoretically the most traumatic part of the process, I could now give myself a prize by doing something super easy and fun. My sister has recently discovered that she owns a vegetable chopper, and all you have to do to work it, is slam it up and down repeatedly, and the garlic becomes chopped automatically. Like magic!

First problem, of course: I didn't bring over the garlic I bought. Of course. I looked and looked all over for garlic and couldn't find any, and after three terrifying - because! the olive oil was already on the skillet which meant TOO LATE to go buy/pick up garlic - minutes I found some, and I got going with the chopping. V. easy and fun. I was feeling totally great, and then I took the chopper apart to wash it and couldn't get it back together again. Every time I tried, it started making horrifying noises SQUEAK SQUEAK SQUEAK (sorry, Robyn!), and I couldn't get it to go back together. At all. It looked all broken and tragic, and after innumerable efforts to mend it while retaining my equanimity, I started to cry because not only was I failing at cooking, but I was also failing at being a good sister. Neither a borrower nor a lender be.

I know this is stupid, but I am writing this while the chicken is simmering in the kitchen, mostly to stave off the moment when I have to cook the pasta, and it still feels v. upsetting right now - anyway, I finally sorted the stupid chopper and carried on cooking the chicken, and I put too much goddamn spice on it. I put the right amount from the recipe, but I guess I had the wrong proportions, so the basil and blackened thingy were just way too much, and my whole house smells like basil. Way too much basil. I am gagging on basil right now. I poured in the tomatoes, covered it, and disconsolately wandered over to write a complainy blog post.

There always comes a time like this, when I am cooking something. I reach a point where I hate the food I am cooking, truly hate it, probably as much as Fred Phelps hates the gays - IF NOT MORE - and I can see why, if these are truly the emotions he possesses, he chooses to send his family out picketing all over the place with his hatred of the gays, and if I could do that with my hatred of the food and not be ridiculous (a challenge Fred Phelps faces too - and does not manage to surmount), I would totally do it at this point in the process. At this point I am ready to take the whole pan and pour it into the trash and sit down and cry for a little while, and ultimately go get take-out.

No idea how the food turned out. I haven't tasted it. The house smells like basil and I don't expect great things out of the chicken spaghetti. But I am going to go make pasta anyway, because I've started and it's too late to stop now.

Oh I am just so excited

2009-08-02T11:07:00.003-05:00

about this. I think it's going to be legen-

(wait for it)

-dary! LEGENDARY! There will be interviews! People will talk nice about Oscar Wilde and I WILL LOVE IT.

So there are people living in this town who have leashes

2009-07-28T13:42:00.004-05:00

FOR THEIR BUNNIES.

And in case that was too confusing, what with the sentence being split between the subject line and the post itself, I'll tell you again. Yesterday I saw a guy and a girl, and the girl was cuddling a bunny, and that was sweet, but the guy was, I swear to God, holding one end of a leash and the other end of the leash was attached to a bunny. Or, I don't know if I can even call it a leash, because it had a little harness on it, which went over the bunny's head and under its little front legs.

If you think about this, it's really great that the guy and the girl have found each other. I don't expect there are that many bunny-leash enthusiasts in this world, and really, what are the odds of finding a mate who is willing to walk outside with you while you wait for your leashed bunny to have a poo, let alone one who is willing to actually hold one end of a leash whose other end is attached to a pooping bunny? The guy and the girl both had a bunny, and both bunnies had a harness leash, and they were in public. People could SEE THEM taking their bunnies out for a poo. (Like me.)

There's this too: In order for the bunny-leash freaks to have purchased this harness leash thing for their bunnies, harness leashes for bunnies had to already exist. Think about that. Someone, somewhere, thought, Hey, you know what we need? Leashes for bunnies! So people can walk their bunnies!, and they thought that this was a pressing enough need that it would be safe to manufacture them en masse. AND THEY WERE RIGHT. Chilling.

Don't get me wrong. I am all in favor of restraining your bunny. The people across the street from where I used to live had this bunny and they let it run free, and the bunny was a great big rapist and it used to sneak up behind the neighborhood cats and start humping them. Its name was Bubbles. One time during the St. Patrick's Day parade a drunk guy saw me near my house and hollered "YOUR BUNNY'S HUMPING THE CAT." He was drunk, but not drunk enough to have forgotten that the proper place for pet bunnies is in a cage. And I think that's a useful lesson for all of us.

Seriously, bunny-leash freaks. The proper place for a pet bunny is in a cage. Just clean out the damn cage. That is what all the other pet bunny owners of this world are doing. Not letting their bunnies roam free. Not putting them on weird harness leashes. They are keeping them in cages like you do guinea pigs, and if you think this is mean to the bunny, the obvious solution is DO NOT HAVE A BUNNY AS A PET.

Babysitters' Club

2009-07-10T15:55:00.002-05:00

I found this website where this chick is rereading all the Babysitters' Club books. I don't know about you, but I was addicted to these books when I was small. I remember one time Anna's best friend offered to give me Super Special #10, the one where they're all in Peter Pan, if I would finish making the cookies she and Anna started to make and then got tired of. This was, like, the best deal ever, and when I conducted a purge of all my BSC books (dammit, wish I still had them), I hung on to that one particular book.

I just reread it this week, and here is my question. I get it that Jessi's being super bitchy in this book, and I get it that the boss-man of the play might not want to give the part of Peter Pan to a middle-schooler. But then he goes ahead and gives it to Kristy; so it's not about her age. And frankly, nobody in this play is going to be super-talented! So why would he NOT give the part (or any part!) to Jessi, who at least can dance and is accustomed to being on stage? He doesn't even give her a speaking part! I feel like this is an example of Ston(e?)ybrook racism, as we witnessed in Jessi's first book. But nobody even brings this up! HE IS BEING A RACIST PRICK AND NOBODY CARES.

I can't remember how they deal with Jessi and racism in the BSC books, apart from the one where she first moves to town, and also that Super Special that takes place at camp, where Mallory and Jessi are supposed to be like junior counselors in training, and their fellow campers don't like them because they're being stuck-up little snots (well they are!), and to show they don't like them, they call Mallory and Jessi "Oreos", and that's where I first learned that term, and I remember being like, Speaking of that, Oreos are delicious, and I went and stole a bunch of cookies from the long thin tin where we used to keep our cookies. Stolen cookies are always sweeter. I wonder if my parents knew how many of those cookies I stole and ate at a time.

Anyway, I'm very entertained by this website. She makes fun of Claudia's clothes. Even at age ten, I thought Claudia's clothes sounded fucking stupid. Why was she always wearing oversized shirts? Does she not have any normal shirts? I feel like Claudia would grow up still wearing these wacky fashions into her mid-thirties, which would be really tragic, but here's what it would lead to, ultimately:

CLAUDIA
(in the 360)
Um, well, this is a great off-the-shoulder oversized blouse with a short neon green skirt and polka-dot tights and ballet shoes. I would wear this like to hang out with my friend Stacey in New York City. She's super sophisticated because she's from New York City. I just think this is a really fun outfit that really reflects my personality.

STACY
There are just so many things wrong with this.

CLINTON
My eyes are burning.

STACY
(bunches the blouse together in the back)
Look what a great figure you have!

CLAUDIA
Yes, I can eat a thousand tons of junk food and never gain weight.

STACY
Oh shut up.

CLAUDIA
Or get pimples.

CLINTON
Why would you want to hide this great figure under all this SHIRT? When you wear this outfit, it makes you look frumpy and stumpy. Let's take a look at an alternative, okay?

Cut to: Cute, elegant manikin outfit

CLAUDIA
But this is so booooring!

STACY
This is not boring, this is elegant!

CLINTON
See, Claudia, this is an outfit that's genuinely sophisticated-

STACY
Which is what we want for you!

CLINTON
Yes, we do. See this ruching below the bodice? That's the kind of lovely feminine detail we want you to look for, that's going to accentuate the narrowest part of you, and really show off that adorable little figure.

Mmm, this is almost as satisfying as imagining what Buffy would do if she ever met Edward Cullen.

Proud of my subconscious

2009-07-09T19:12:00.001-05:00

Well, I am. My subconscious is very inventive and fun. I have all sorts of good dreams, and even when I have nightmares, they are rife with useful symbolism for me to think about. And because I am in no way responsible for its workings, I do not hesitate to praise my subconscious lavishly without feeling like a bragging bragger. I can’t help it! It’s very creative and interesting! Much more so than my waking self – which seems very unfair.

This is what my subconscious did on Wednesday morning like a genius. See, it was raining really hard on Tuesday night, and I guess the power must have clicked off for a second, because my alarm clock didn’t go off at the appointed time, which was about 5:50. I had set it early to make sure I made it to the place where I had to be at 6:35. On Wednesday morning, I woke up several times, then went back to sleep because it wasn’t time to get up yet, because my alarm clock hadn’t gone off. Ordinarily when I wake up in the morning, I check my clock to make sure I don’t need to get up, but this morning I was tired and I knew if I checked the clock it would wake me up more and I wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep.

(Though really I was oversleeping.)

Anyway I had this dream that my father came over to my apartment to hang some curtains. I actually do have curtains at my apartment that I intended to put up a while ago, and my father offered to come over and hang them for me, but it seemed like too much trouble for him so I never bothered with it. But in my dream, he came over to hang up the curtains and said, “Boy, you’re hard to wake up!”

And I said, “You mean that was you waking me up, when I woke up before?”

And he said, “Yes, you’re late. You were supposed to get up a while ago and help me with the curtains.”

I said, “No. I’m getting up at 5:50 in order to go to that place by 6:35,” and he said, “No, you’re very late. Very, very late,” and suddenly there was someone else with me who agreed that I was very late. We went on discussing this for a little while – I was certain that we hadn’t made any appointment to put up curtains, but Daddy and the other person kept telling me I was late, so finally I said, “Oh, fine,” and shook myself awake and checked the clock, and lo, it proved that I had overslept by a good thirty-five minutes.

My subconscious did that cause it’s helpful and cool. So.

Department of Mysteries

2009-07-06T20:27:00.000-05:00

One of my most vivid memories of the Harry Potter series is reading the end of the fifth book at Nezabeth’s house with her and Anna, that scene in the Department of Mysteries. It was very early in the morning, because we’d been reading since the book came out at midnight, and I was shaking all over, partly from tiredness but mostly from tension, because damn, is that scene ever tense. Whenever I reread it now, I get that same shaky feeling, except now I know what’s coming, so I also burst into tears right around the time Neville tells Harry not to give it to her, and I keep on crying till the book finishes. And the same thing in the movie – during the Department of Mysteries scene, I was absolutely rigid with tension.

And then Dumbledore showed up.

I do not love Michael Gambon as Dumbledore. They should have cast Ian McKellan or, as my mother said, Bill Nighy – we feel like either of them could have conveyed the humor and presence of Dumbledore more better than Michael Gambon does. Despite that, when Dumbledore showed up in the film of Order of the Phoenix, every single muscle in my body relaxed. I hadn’t even realized how tense I was until he showed up and I completely relaxed, because everything was going to be okay, because Dumbledore was there.

That’s how I feel when I go to the eye doctor.

I can tell you this is true because I went to the eye doctor today, for the first time in a while, and I remembered how completely soothing my eye doctor is. I have been seeing her since I was a little, little girl of six or seven, and I find the eye tests so relaxing. My favorite one is the one where she clicks through the different lenses to see which one is better for my eyes, and she says, “One, or two?” and I say, Two, and she says, “Two, or three?” Oh so relaxing. It’s like when Dumbledore shows up. I just relax perfectly. How serene it is. And that nice test with the signs on the railroad tracks? Mmmmmmmm. I do not even mind that much when they puff air into my eyes or make me stare into black and white concentric circles in order to get a map of my eye. Because my eye doctor makes me feel so calm.

After giving this some thought, I’ve concluded that it’s because I spent a lot of time at the eye doctor in third and fourth grade, and third and fourth grade sucked really really hard. So I think that I view my eye doctor as my savior. It was so nice when, instead of having to go to school and get into fights with the younger version of Rachel McAdams from Mean Girls, I could go to the eye doctor and watch the entrancing display board that kept changing and changing. And then get my eyes tested, and I’d be out of school for a whole morning or a whole afternoon and it was GREAT. I think that’s why.

Proof

2009-07-06T08:45:00.001-05:00

I am so relieved. Seriously, I am so, so, so relieved.

Ever since I got my library card renewed (it’s a major change in my life, this library card renewal business, brought on a serious existential crisis), I’ve been desperately worrying that I am Not Cut Out to be a writer, and that I’ve been sort of nailing my colors to the mast all this time when really I am just doomed to be miserable no matter what I do, and being a writer won’t make me happy. But I am pleased to report that my experiment from yesterday worked perfectly.

I read two books yesterday. I love reading. And you know what makes reading even better? I will tell you what makes reading even better: feeling like you are achieving work while you are reading. Actually, this makes everything better. This is why I like cross-stitching, and covering books in contact paper, while I watch movies or Merlin or whatever. If I have an end product, I feel like the time I spent watching Merlin wasn’t wasted, because look! I accomplished something! I protected my books for the rest of forever! Anyway, so yesterday I read two books, and when I finished them, I was like, YES! I HAVE LEARNED! WITH EACH BOOK I READ I BECOME MIGHTIER IN KNOWLEDGE. NOW I MUST GO FORTH AND CREATE! And then I laughed an evil scientist laugh and put a few more bolts into the head of my monster and set him loose on the populace.

And then I worked on this one story until three, and by then I was tired, so I put on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (I haven’t watched the fourth season in forever – it’s sad when they all split apart and don’t love each other!) and watched that while revising another story, and that was very satisfactory, and then in the evening I ate an unhealthy dinner and washed my hair and went to bed early. Which I expect is about what I would do if I were for reals a full-time writer.

And today? Today I am in SUCH A GOOD MOOD. Holy crap. I have such love for humanity right now. This morning after I got dressed, I was like, Hey, Buffy’s hair looked so pretty when she tied the front bits in the back. I’m going to try that with my hair. I get these ideas a lot in the morning, and normally it goes like this:

(JENNY tries to make HAIR do what she wants.)
HAIR: Fuck you. I would prefer to be in a braid.
JENNY: NO. THIS IS WHAT I WANT.
HAIR: I refuse to obey you.
(HAIR gets into a hopeless snarl and JENNY is reduced to tears at how unmanageable HAIR is, but after two tries she recognizes that it’s never going to work, so she just puts stupid HAIR in a braid.)

If you see me, and my hair’s in a braid, then it’s not terribly unlikely that the above scene played out that morning. But today, it went like this.

(JENNY tries to make hair do what she wants.)
HAIR: Fuck you. I would prefer to be in a braid.
(HAIR gets into a hopeless snarl.)
JENNY: Oh, Hair darling, if you only knew how much I loved you!
(JENNY untangles HAIR gently and lovingly, and gives it another go and succeeds brilliantly and looks pretty and thereafter has to keep checking herself out in a mirror because she loves her hair ever so much and never gets to see it all long and nice because ordinarily when it’s down it gets in her eyes until she hates it and puts it back in a braid.)

So, good. I am not doomed to misery. My hair looks pretty today, and writing is definitely what I’m supposed to be doing. End library card renewal existential crisis.

Having a perfect Sunday

2009-07-05T13:33:00.002-05:00

I'll tell you how it all went down. First I got up and walked the dog and fed the cats. (Someone else's, not mine.) This was okay because the dog accomplished the appropriate tasks in a very reasonable amount of time. Sometimes we walk up and down the median with her sniffing everything while I'm going, "PLEASE POOP. PLEASE POOP. IT IS SO HOT OUTSIDE. PLEASE POOP." No such problems today.

Then I got home, and I was going to watch Gilmore Girls, but then I remembered that I'm supposed to be practicing for when I become a full-time freelance writer (no remarks from the peanut gallery necessary on this point), so I decided I'd try out my plan for being a full-time freelance writer, which involves eating peaches and reading in the morning, and writing all afternoon. The peaches part was tricky. The dog thought she deserved some peaches, maybe because of how well she had performed her tasks on the morning walk. She kept coming as close to me as she could and looking pointedly at the peaches, and then after I had rapidly eaten them all up, she wanted to come sniff my mouth. And after the peaches were gone, and I was reading the totally disappointing Children of Men, she still wanted to come and be all up in my business, because she thought there were still peaches, and obviously because she didn't realize that if there had been peaches, I WOULD NOT have given them to a dog. Give peaches to a dog. This is that thing about casting pearls before swine. No indeed.

And now the dog has fallen asleep in a blanket, and I am writing, and listening to Radio Paradise. I love me some Radio Paradise. It is buffering now, and not playing, but I tell myself this is just part of the starving artist experience - slow-buffering free online radio.

Watching Moulin Rouge with my little sister

2009-06-21T15:27:00.002-05:00

Ewan McGregor in shattered tones: The woman I love...
Robyn: IS HAVING AN AWESOME TIME IN PARIS.
Ewan McGregor: ...is...
Jenny: THE BEST WIFE IN THE WHOLE WORLD AND ENJOYING LIVING HAPPILY EVER AFTER.
Ewan McGregor: ...dead.
Robyn and Jenny: HAPPY AND ALIVE.

We forgot how adorable Ewan McGregor was in this film. Hot damn. Oh, and also how sexymazing Nicole Kidman was when she had red hair and curves.

Ewan McGregor: How could I know, in those final days--
Jenny: That poor Satine had a terrible illness that could only be cured by something awesome happening!
Robyn: Only be cured by a shock of joy!
Ewan McGregor: --stronger than love--
Robyn: But not stronger than a shock of joy!

Jenny: Hahaha, I like the part where Ewan McGregor tells her that he wasn't trying to trick her or anything...
Robyn (giving this due reflection): I like the part where they live happily ever after.
Jenny: Me too. That's the best part in the whole film. It's really good when the curtain falls and then the movie ends because there's no point it carrying on when they're living happily ever after.
Robyn: Yep, that's the best part.
Jenny: Yep, of the whole film.

But seriously, though, Moulin Rouge is fantastic. It has been way too long since I watched this film. I love rewatching films I haven't seen in ages - I forgot how hilarious Moulin Rouge is, and just think how easily it could have been total crap.

Turtles and cars

2009-06-18T17:04:00.004-05:00

So y’all already know about me and my animal-saving ways. I always want to save poor little animals from squashy deaths on public thoroughfares. I saved a raccoon recently, and on my 21st birthday I tried really hard to save a toad though I don’t know what happened to it, and one time I saved a little cute dog, which is the shining star, really, on my saving things record, as the dog was eventually reunited with his owner in a joyful rollicking Wivenhoe park reunion.

I only mention this because I am doing this new thing where I go for walks, even though it’s as hot as the hinges of hell and I hate the heat with a hot hate, and yesterday I didn’t want to even more than I have not wanted to on the previous two days that I have done this. Because yesterday I was going to hang out with my lovely friend later on that evening, and that meant I had to go walking early, which meant it was much sunnier and therefore much hotter. And yesterday it would have been so easy just to not go. I could have just washed my hair straight away when I got home, and read my book about psychiatry, and worked on this big project I’m doing, or covered my books in contact paper and watched interviews with Stephen Fry on YouTube.

But I went walking, and it is a good thing (mercy, I am using a lot of italics today; I blame this on my recent rereading of Emily Climbs), because as I was on my way back to my apartment, I was rounding a slightly busy curve, and as a car came round the curve in one lane, I spotted in the other lane a great big turtle plodding across the road. It had a nice little face, and more cars were coming in the first lane, towards which the turtle was headed with plodding certainty. Fortunately I was there to save him. I flung myself out in front of the moving cars to stop them from continuing on their path of destruction, and gently scooped up the turtle and brought him to safety by a nearby creek.

(My mother is reading this and having a heart attack. I’m just kidding, Mother. I did not fling myself into oncoming traffic in order to save the turtle. That wouldn’t have helped, they would have just swerved to avoid me and hit the turtle anyway. Merely corroborative detail to lend artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.)

Of course, afterwards I realized that I had taken the poor turtle back to the exact place that he was crossing the street to get away from. It reminded me of this story I once wrote with Nezabeth when we were much smaller, all about a little turtle called Fortinbras who lived in a lake that was called Deep Clear Lake but it should have been called Shallow Dirty Lake because that is what the lake was, and Fortinbras yearned for something more. This turtle probably poked its head back out of its shell after I put it down and was like, FUCK. I just LEFT HERE.

Oh well. At least it isn’t dead. I saved it!

Life is weird

2009-06-17T16:15:00.001-05:00

I eat bananas every day and am posting a fun fact about bananas. Past Jenny could not have predicted that this was going to happen.

Still, in spite of how much this post would make Past Jenny gag and vomit, I feel like you should know this fun fact. It makes bananas more fun. If you break off a small piece of a banana, and press into the middle of it with your finger, it will split nicely into three nice pieces. If you do not feel like getting banana on your fingers, you can accomplish the same effect with your tongue when the banana is in your mouth. IT IS AWESOME.

P.S. This behavior on the part of bananas has to do with Science. I have not just made it up.

Speed shopping

2009-06-15T20:21:00.000-05:00

I just have to boast about this because I HATE SHOPPING. Or rather, I hate shopping that I have to do. I do not mind shopping as long as I am not shopping for a particular thing that I need to buy right now. This is because I am a Meyers-Briggs J and I like to have my decisions made quickly. If I don’t need to make a decision straight away, then the pressure is off and I can shop in a relaxed fashion and not worry about whether I buy something or don’t buy something. (Except that if I don’t buy something I will be cranky because it will have been a wasted shopping trip.)

Anyway, yesterday my sister and I were at the mall shopping for perfumes, because we were both tired of our old perfume and we wanted something new. I got one that smells like jasmine and violets, and Robyn got a nice citrusy cedary one, and anyway since we were at the mall anyway we wanted to try on prom dresses. We really love trying on prom dresses. I like to try on dresses that are poofy like a Disney princess or a cupcake, and Robyn likes to try on dresses that are so slinky you can’t even tell they are a dress when they’re on the hanger. We love trying on dresses. (The Say Yes to the Dress people would hate us.)

As we were heading in the direction of one of the department stores to look for cupcakey and slinky dresses, I said, “Unnnnnnnngh, I have to buy some new work shirts. Gross,” and Robyn said, “Yuck, that won’t be any fun” – because of the previously mentioned dislike of shopping for things that I need to get right now – and I espied Express having a sale on tops, and I said, “Can I just go in really fast and try some stuff on, really fast, and then we can go try prom dresses?” And because Robyn is a nice person she said yes.

IT WAS THE BEST SHOPPING TRIP EVER. Seriously, we went in there and grabbed like twelve shirts, and I tried them on. Robyn kindly folded them up and shook them out for me, and kept track of which ones we liked and which ones we wanted in another color or another size, and then we went back and got the other colors and other sizes, and lickety-split I tried those ones on again and we made a decision and we checked out. We were in that shop fifteen minutes. Tops. (See what I did there?) I got some sexy-ass shirts, and I got new perfume.

(Fortunately! If our pride in our shopping expedition had depended on trying on pretty prom dresses, we would have been woefully disappointed! The department stores didn’t have any prom dresses! What are people supposed to do who have formal parties to go to? Are they all supposed to wear sundresses? Is that what’s supposed to happen?)

(We did see the masturbating bear overlooking the children’s play area, though. It is very disturbing. I need them to take it away. I simply cannot believe that none of the mall employees have noticed what that bear is up to.)

(Oh, and they had a big bouncy sproingy thing set up, which we enjoyed watching. BOING. BOING. BOING. It was very cool. If we had not just spent loads of money on expensive perfumes, we might have gone on the big sproingy fun thing.)

Organization

2009-06-12T17:26:00.002-05:00

When the new Wal-Mart opened up in town, the great big enormous one that I avoid like the plague because I hate it, my little sister’s friend Erin Molly was in love with it. She could not get over how beautifully it was organized. And I laughed at her, because yes, it was organized, but it was still – you know – EVIL. I felt like organization was all very well, but there were certain trade-ins you just don’t want to make in your life. For instance, the old Wal-Mart was very close to my house and very convenient to get to, and the new Wal-Mart was way less convenient and located on a crowded busy road. And to me, swapping convenient for organized is not a good trade.

I bring this up as an example of my hypocrisy because I just clicked like nine folders to get to the file I wanted. I am compulsive about organizing my computer files. Computer files can be like such a nice beautiful filing system, with subfiles, which is hard to do in a physical filing system. You can put things in a folder, and then in a more specific folder inside the first folder, and then inside a more specific folder again, and then inside that folder, inside a folder that is STILL MORE SPECIFIC EVEN THAN THAT. As far as I am concerned, the more folders I have to open up to get to the file I want, the more virtuously organized I am.

When I was still in school, I had a folder that said "Class Stuff", which insouciant title might suggest to the casual observer a general laissez-faire philosophy when it came to organizing my school files. NOT SO MY FRIEND.

Inside "Class Stuff", I had it organized by semester ("Fall 2006", "Spring 2007" and so forth), and inside each semester I had it organized by class. Then inside each class folder, I had a folder for class information, like the syllabus, project descriptions, and that stuff. I had a folder labeled Assignments, and then subfolders for each major project in the class; I used to make these on the very first day of class, and it made me feel pleasantly well-prepared for what was going to come. For each paper I was going to write, I made a folder where I put my notes, and a folder where I put the PDF files of articles I was going to reference, and then a folder for drafts of the paper. That meant that if I wanted to get to the current draft of my paper, I had to open up six folders. Six, and I will count them for you - "Class Stuff", "Fall 2006", "Milton", "Assignments", "Term Paper", "Drafts".

Yeah. Efficiency is my middle name.

In which I make it clear that I don't understand finance

2009-06-12T11:24:00.003-05:00

Now, I hesitate to announce this to the internet. I’m sure that no sooner will I write these words down, than I will have an enormous crash into misery again. But for the past week I have been weirdly happy. I am just full of this sense of well-being and satisfaction, which it has been a long time since I have felt this way for nearly a week. I have all this equanimity and calmness. It’s very odd, following as it does upon several months of depression, and I have been trying to account for it.

And this is what I have come up with. My serotonin levels are up because of bananas. Yes, bananas. Previously in my life I have been known to say that I cannot eat bananas, because as soon as I eat two bites of a banana, it feels like my entire digestive system is full of banana, backed up all the way up my esophagus, so if I eat another bite of banana, there won’t be anywhere to go because my esophagus is already full, and it will just sit in my mouth until it rots and fruit flies start gathering around it.

(Ew, that was really gross.)

But then I started eating bananas, because I don’t eat enough fruit, and bananas travel relatively well and keep for a relatively long time in comparison with other fruits, and they’re cheap. Nowadays, I eat a banana every day at lunch, and I have been doing this for a while, and what has happened, my friends, is that this investment in bananas, is now paying off in SERIOUS MAJOR HOPEFULLY LONG-TERM TRYPTOPHAN DIVIDENDS.

(I am not entirely sure what dividends are. They’re what investments pay off in, right? Isn’t that what dividends means, when they aren’t the top halves of fractions?)

Because when a mommy tryptophan and something complicated with chemistry, there becomes serotonin! Get your tryptophan from carbohydrates rather than poultry, and it will give you happiness. I read an article.

Holy crap, peaches

2009-06-06T13:19:00.002-05:00

How did I forget about peaches? It is suddenly peach season! Like magic! I went to the grocery shop, and I was looking around for pecans in order to make a salad (yeah, ya heard - I'm making a salad, and it is going to be AWESOME), and instead of pecans! I found! Peaches!

And they looked sort of small and sad, so instead of buying A THOUSAND OF THEM, I only bought one, one little peach that felt exactly squishy enough, and on the way home, I was trying to convince myself not to get too excited about it, because peaches are great but they're hard to get right. Oftentimes peaches are not that delicious.

I got home and I sliced off a piece and oh, my God, it was perfect. Perfect I say. There has never been such a delicious peach in the entire history of peaches. I mean maybe there has, but I have no way of knowing about it, because I have been living in a state of peach withdrawal. I didn't realize what a wretched state it was until I had this peach, the most delicious peach ever.

Peaches are my favorite food. Don't think I'm just saying this because I'm basking in the afterglow of a peachgasm. Peaches really are my favorite food. I have often said that if I had to live on only one food for the rest of my life, it would be peaches. Yes, I would be as sick as a dog, but really, living on only one food, that's inevitable, and at least my mouth would be happy.

GET A PEACH MY FRIENDS.

Oh, Spike (a Torchwood update)

2009-05-29T13:18:00.002-05:00

I started watching Torchwood for much the same reason that I started watching Angel – because I’d fallen in love with the show from which it had been spun off, and I wanted to make the original show last longer while still feeding my addiction. Torchwood isn’t as good a spin-off as Angel is. I think partly because Angel gets a little cheerier on his own show than he is on Buffy, but Captain Jack – who was cheeringly cheerful on Doctor Who – gets grimmer. And I like cheerful people. Part of the reason I like Doctor Who so much is that Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant are both really, really cheerful. Plus, to be frank, the cast of Torchwood isn’t a terribly good ensemble cast, whereas the cast of Angel is quite, quite superb. Like when they brought on Wesley, and he was a rogue demon hunter? Ah, the good old days. The Torchwood characters are less fully realized.

I only bring this up so that when I refer to Spike it’ll be clear that I’m not likening Torchwood to Buffy and Angel at all. It’s not as good. Sorry. Maybe because Steven Moffat wasn’t involved in Torchwood.

Spike is in love with Captain Jack. And, I mean, why not, right? All the people who meet Captain Jack seem to fall over themselves being in love with him. Something to do with 51st-century pheromones (don’t blame me, I didn’t make it up). There are confusing innuendos about stopwatches. There are gun-shootin’ lessons. There are dances atop invisible spaceships next to Big Ben. But today Spike won the being-in-love-with-Captain-Jack contest, because today Spike urged Captain Jack to sing along with the song that was playing, because (he said) “It’s our song”, and Captain Jack said, “We don’t have a song. And if we did have a song, it wouldn’t be that song.”

Referring to Sarah Brightman’s enduring classic “I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper.”

I’ll give you that again. Spike told Captain Jack Harkness that “I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper” was their song.

Mm. I guess this is so funny for me because Spike and Jack were already making me laugh by – well, just everything really. I mean Torchwood is drastically not as good as Doctor Who, I only carry on watching it because Welsh accents are funny, but it’s brilliant to have Spike show up and be in love with Jack. Their relationship is not unlike the one Spike and Buffy share. With the Spike liking the object of his affection a lot more than the object of his affection likes him, and with the beating each other up and trying to kill each other in between making out. And then just when I thought that there was no way at all for them to be any funnier, they toss in “I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper” and call it their song.

And in case YouTube won’t load for you:

Tell me, Captain Strange, do you feel my devotion
Or are you like a droid, devoid of emotion
Encounters one and two are not enough for me
What my body needs is close encounter three

I lost my heart to a starship trooper
Flashing lights in hyper space
Fighting for the Federation
Hand in hand we’ll conquer space.

Another good thing

2009-05-21T07:42:00.003-05:00

about Ben Barnes being Dorian Gray in a film of Dorian Gray. I do not need, of course, to say how perfect Ben Barnes is for this part, with his big serious black eyes and everything. Nor do I need to point out to you that films set in Victorian times are already good, even if they do not contain Ben Barnes and Colin Firth (as this one does). And I am optimistically hoping that Colin Firth's presence in the movie will make it flashy and high-profile. All these things can go without saying.

Here is something you may not have considered, but I have, because I'm a dork: If they are making a film based on one of Oscar Wilde's books, and Ben Barnes and Colin Firth have to go around promoting it all over the place, then do you know what that means? It means lots of extra people saying nice things about Oscar Wilde. They will be all like, And of course, Oscar Wilde was a genius. Absolutely unparalleled wit, that Oscar Wilde. They will be like, Now, Colin, you were in a film version of The Importance of Being Earnest - how does that compare? and Colin Firth will be all, Well, the source material is very different, and the interviewer will be like, Oscar Wilde was clever that way, writing different type things like a clever genius.

Because, yes. I light up like a Times Square Christmas tree when someone says something nice about Oscar Wilde. The other day at work I was talking with Carrie about books that are famous that we don't like, and I was pleased because I like trashing classic novels, and then Carrie said she didn't like The Picture of Dorian Gray! I am not even that in love with The Picture of Dorian Gray, but still my face fell and I said, "But - but Oscar Wilde wrote it," like that was going to hold sway over Carrie.

Whereas if you give Oscar Wilde a compliment in my presence, I will beam radiantly and agree with you, and tell you something else nice about Oscar Wilde that you might not have known. I feel very proud of Oscar Wilde when he gets compliments, because I love him so much. It is like I am his mama.

Also, I discovered last night that I care more about Oscar Wilde than about myself. I was taking a shower and trying to think whether, if I could go back in time to meet Oscar Wilde, I would go back in time to before his trials & disgrace, or after. Before the trials, he would be cheerier and funnier and cooler to hang out with, and he wouldn't make us both feel awkward by asking us for money. On the other hand if I went to meet him after the trials, I could tell him that I was from the future, and show him pennies, and tell him that in the future, everyone thinks he's brilliant and totally likes him and uses him as the gold standard for clever people, and I could tell him that his trial and downfall is considered by some to be a watershed in the construction of sexuality (well, I might leave that bit out and just tell him how everyone likes him in the future).

And although I would rather made cheerful fun cool Oscar Wilde, his happiness is more important than mine (I discovered). I would definitely go to after the trials. I would buy him tea and tell him flattering things, and that would cheer him up, poor thing.

Disoriented

2009-05-15T17:45:00.001-05:00

Here is how my morning went: My alarm clock went off right as the protagonist of my dream had learned a valuable life lesson and was shifting an old-fashioned phone back into its normal position, with a wry smile. This phone-and-wry-smile business was very crucial to the fairly elaborate plot of my dream, and although credits were about to roll anyway, I felt frustrated with my alarm clock for breaking in with talk about fixing arthritis right at this vital moment. I got up and switched off my alarm clock and found that I could not remember whether I had dreamed that bit about arthritis relief. I turned the radio back on, and a song was playing, nothing about arthritis at all, so I still have no idea whether the arthritis was in my imagination.

As I was brushing my teeth, I suddenly became seized with unhappiness because I had gotten to work two hours late and failed to finish this award nomination thing I’m doing, and been sent home in disgrace. I spat out my toothpaste disconsolately, worrying about getting fired, and then remembered that, no, that being sent home in disgrace thing didn’t actually happen in real life, it was only seven o’clock and there hadn’t been time for me to get there late and get sent home. I tried to remember whether I had had a dream where that happened, which, yes, I had, and that brought the dream all flooding back, along with a vague memory about needing to drive out to Bluebonnet for some reason later on today. I knew that wasn’t true – what’s out on Bluebonnet anyway?

I put in my contact lenses, got dressed, went downstairs, realized I’d forgotten my Julian of Norwich necklace, and went back upstairs for it. I couldn’t find it and couldn’t find it, and I was getting really upset, and then I realized that it was on my neck already. And then I remembered that I’d had a dream where I forgot my necklace and spent the whole day reaching for it, to play with the chain, and finding nothing there. And then I remembered that I do have to go out to Bluebonnet today, to deliver something important for work to an important Bluebonnet office.

I went back downstairs properly, and as I was getting my cereal, I discovered that my lovely roommate had made me yummy birthday chocolate stuff with “Happy Birthday” on it in icing. This was of course very pleasing, and because I did not want it to become infested with fruit flies (grrrr), I Saran-wrapped it and stuck it in the fridge. I went to pour my cereal, and as I was pouring it, I thought what a nice dream it had been to find that Megan had made me chocolate-iced brownies. No wait. That was real. No it wasn’t. I had to check the refrigerator because I couldn’t figure out whether it was real or not. (Yes, it was. Megan is nice.)

Oh, yes, and then when I got to work, I sat down at my desk, remembered something vague about two of my coworkers not coming in that day, remembered that it was a dream, and felt relieved because its being a dream meant that I wouldn’t have to answer phones by myself all morning. And then I checked my email and discovered it wasn’t a dream at all.

I find all this very confusing. I always have difficulty with dreams and real life, but not usually so much difficulty in one single morning.

Poor door.

2009-05-13T13:36:00.000-05:00

There’s this old (or middle-aged maybe? I haven’t looked at her that closely) lady with a poodle in town, and she’s always taking her poodle for walks around campus. When I’m driving near the lakes, I often see her and her poodle out walking, and because the lady is I guess really reluctant to get wet, she always brings an umbrella on her walks, and the poodle has to carry the umbrella in its mouth. The poodle never looks any too thrilled about this. When they are stopped, waiting to cross a road, the poodle puts it down on the ground, and it always seems reluctant to pick it up again when they start walking. I feel sorry for the poodle.

Because I am sometimes sad, I have been assigned to stop noticing that I’m sad, when I’m sad, and instead pay close attention to things that are happening around me. This is a good strategy for not being sad at work, but it does give me other things to worry about. For instance, today I noticed that the lock on the bathroom stalls is bolted in with two bolts that look like eyes, and then a wide piece of metal that looks slightly like an animal face; and now when the door is bolted, if I tilt my head sideways, it looks like a sad-eyed creature is holding the door closed with its mouth. And I keep thinking of the poor poodle with the umbrella and how sorry I am for it, so I feel like I have to pee really really fast in order to minimize its suffering.

Fine, then, human tendency to anthropomorphize! YOU WIN THIS ROUND, but I WILL BE BACK. And I hope you noticed that I DIDN’T CARE AT ALL when my friend fed baby birds to her snakes but in fact thought it was a TOTALLY EXCELLENT STORY. So THERE.

Many different thoughts to think

2009-05-11T21:14:00.001-05:00

So this weekend was slightly depressing. I got food poisoning or something, and I spent all day Sunday dealing with that (v. v. yucky) and trying to figure out how to cheer myself up from food poisoning, a difficult proposition as you will know if you have ever been food poisoned. Eventually I hit upon the ABC sitcom Better Off Ted, and that worked brilliantly for a while. But there are only seven episodes, and I had soon watched them all, and then I washed YouTube videos of Portia de Rossi being awesome, and then I finished doing that and I lay around on the couch for a while moaning miserably. Not much fun if you have ever done it. And then I decided to go to the library.

I love the library.

The library was mostly a success. I got some books about book publishing, about which I always want to know more things, and I got some books about books, which is fun. I decided which ones to get by looking at their indexes for authors I liked, and then quickly reading what they had to say about authors I liked. And if they said things like “Have His Carcase was tedious and awful, and Gaudy Night was pretentious”, or “The Horse and His Boy was racist and sexist and stupid”, or “Oscar Wilde was not a good writer and nobody really likes him”, I put them back immediately and stuck my tongue out at them. Whereas if they didn’t say anything like that, I checked them out.

(Oscar Wilde was a good writer, and everybody liked him.)

Anyway, on the way home, I was driving, driving, driving, and for the first time ever I was glad they put up that stop sign by the golf course. I had pulled to a stop at the stop sign, and a raccoon crossed in front of my car and trembled and waddled towards my front wheels. And it was a baby raccoon. It waddled so adorably. It had a little sweet face. It looked up at me beseechingly like it was saying, Please, Jenny, please do not kill me. I am too young to die. I have not yet begun to live. I have rooted in very few garbage cans. Please spare me.

Of course I could not drive forward with a teeny weeny little baby raccoon staring up at me with “Please spare me” eyes. The car behind me honked, and I quickly decided how it would go if the raccoon didn’t move, and didn’t move, and the car behind me got very angry. I would get out of my car and shoo the baby raccoon away. And perhaps that would not work, and the car behind me’s owner would get out and yell mean things like “CRAZY WOMAN DRIVER” and I would say “You know not whereof you speak! In front of my car is a tiny little baby raccoon! Its life has hardly begun! I cannot kill this tiny raccoon, and you shall not force my car to go forward to kill this teensy sweet baby animal!” It would be very dramatic and exciting. I would stick to my guns and not allow the raccoon to be destroyed. I would say “Shoot if you must this old grey head / but spare this raccoon from being dead”, except I would come up with a better rhyme at the end.

In the event, the raccoon waddled adorably away before the car behind me could honk any more. Phew.

Oh, and then? When I got home? I read a story on my friend’s Facebook wall that was the perfect counterpart to my raccoon event. See, apparently she went outside one day recently and found a bunch of baby birds that had fallen out of their nest and were chirping unhappily at her. If it had been me, I would not have known what to do with them, because I would have worried that I would mess up everything and do things totally wrong; but fortunately she was the one to find them, and she used to work for a veterinarian, so instead of freaking out and standing there staring at them in chagrin before eventually deciding to leave them alone and hope that the mama bird found them and everything worked out okay, she FED THEM TO HER SNAKES. Waste not, want not.

I bought art!

2009-05-03T18:45:00.004-05:00

I'm very excited about it. It's the first piece of original art I have ever bought all by myself. It is extremely beautiful. If you saw it you would be extremely impressed. It is by a local Turkish artist (yes, I know - he's Turkish, but he lives and works here), and he does some excessively beautiful metal sculptures. I liked all of them, but I liked one of them the very best, so after some hemming and hawing I eventually decided to get it.

Here is his website, Cetin Ates.

I a lot liked the one called "I want my life back" - with the man climbing up the key to get to the keyhole. It's very Dave McKeany. But the one I got is the second one down on the Gallery page, called "Busy Mind". I love it. I feel guilty for buying it because the artist said it was his favorite one too, and he said he wasn't going to sell it until his wife told him that it didn't make sense not to sell it. The picture doesn't do it justice. He has a keyhole in his chest, which I completely love.

Here are more of his sculptures also. Find the "Don Quixote" one. It's beautiful. But not as good as my one.

Casting about for something brilliant to say

2009-04-14T20:47:00.003-05:00

You know how sometimes when you are talking to someone about something, you quickly run out of things to say about that topic? Like, I don't know, bricks. Here are some things I think about when I see bricks:

1. Why are some brick houses so ugly?
2. If I stole those bricks and got some planks from somewhere, I could make a bookshelf.
3. One time, Frank Gilbreth showed off his leet brick-laying skillz to his future in-laws.
4. That Ben Folds Five song that I didn't realize was about abortion until someone pointed it out to me, just another of many examples of me totally ignoring what song lyrics are plainly saying
5. The weird old-timey British compliment

Although all of these things run through my head when I see a brick, none of them are likely to lead to really good conversations. So if I am with you, and we get onto the subject of bricks, the conversation will probably trail off slightly.

Today I was walking with my father, and we were checking out dandelions, and I was thinking of things to say about dandelions. I told him how Mumsy correctly hypothesized that you would be more likely to get your wish if you blew from the bottom of the dandelion (by the stalk), and then I had nothing else to say about dandelions, so I was thinking about them, and it occurred to me it's very lucky for dandelions that people think blowing dandelions away will grant you a wish, because, ta-da! instant fertilization.

In fact, like, weirdly lucky for dandelions.

My Latin teacher used to tell us useful information that she said would save our lives someday (such as, hit a marauding alligator on its nose and poke its eyes and scream really loudly because it won't like that and will waddle away). So here is something that I thought of today that might save your life someday, and I told it to my father, and I am telling it to you, and I recommend that you pass it on to your friends and relations and possibly Homeland Security so that we can ALL BE PREPARED.

This wish business with the dandelions? I have used my deductive skills to deduce that it's an alien plot. Aliens, for some unfathomable alien reason, have a vested interest in ensuring the long-term prosperity of the dandelion. They have infiltrated Earth and spread this rumor about getting wishes, in order to ensure that dandelion spores are spread far and wide. So if ever you are walking around, and aliens land in front of you, and you are panicking because you are afraid that they are going to take you onto their ship and do bad things to you, here's what you do. (Don't smile - they might think you're baring your teeth.) You say, "Welcome to DANDELION LAND! Is it not glorious? We only regret that we do not have MANY MORE DANDELIONS to offer to you, our distinguished visitors!" And then they will spare your life.

You're welcome.

You may have heard

2009-04-13T15:26:00.003-05:00

about the fact that Amazon.com has a quote unquote "glitch" (yes, I said "quote unquote" and then used quotation marks - this is redundant but I do it to indicate my skepticism that "glitch" accurately describes what's going on there) which causes books with content relating to GLBT issues to suddenly not be ranked on the Amazon ranking system anymore! Which causes them to slide way, way down the page, so when I do a search for Fingersmith, which I just finished rereading and thoroughly enjoyed, Amazon is like, What book is that? Do you by any chance mean all these other books and films that are not Fingersmith at all?

I know it's Easter Monday, and Amazon is doing its best, and it can't solve everything right away. I know this. I still feel angry anyway. What is your problem, Amazon? Sarah Waters, really? Really? You need to protect the public from the adult content in the books of a woman who has been nominated for the Booker prize twice? Really? And Jeanette Winterson? I don't know what to say to you, Amazon. You have done so much for me over the years, sending me Christmas gifts for my loved ones, and books for me to gloat over, and the first series of Doctor Who, and I have loved all of these things greatly. But STRAIGHTEN THE HELL UP.

(Ha, ha, straighten up. See how I made a funny? How I can make a funny in the midst of being really irritated?)

Yeah, Amazon, straighten up and fly right. I don't want to hear about any more of your shenanigans.

Doctor Who

2009-04-11T09:24:00.003-05:00

When my sisters and I were small, and somebody we liked was about to leave, we used to attach ourselves to them to prevent it. Robyn and I would each sit on one foot and cling like monkeys, and Anna would launch herself from the side of the sofa to the adult's back, from which lofty position she would do her best to stop them from prying off Robyn and me. I recognized that, adults being larger and stronger than we were, we would probably not be able to stop them leaving by main force (a point, incidentally, that I think Anna failed to grasp). I did have this notion, though, that they just hadn't realized how much we wanted them to stay, and if we could show them, by our actions, the power of our love, the sincerity of our need for them to stay and not go, their hearts would be moved by our simple childish affection, and then they would stay longer.

I really, really wish that David Tennant wouldn't leave Doctor Who. But I am far too old to sit on his feet.

Prepare to be so, so jealous

2009-04-03T21:52:00.003-05:00

What did you do Friday night?

Do not even bother to tell me what you did on Friday night. Whatever you did Friday night, it was not nearly as excellent as the totally legendary thing that I did on Friday night. On Friday night, I went with Robyn to Bongs & Noodles to get something, and while I was there, I realized that THERE WAS STARLAB.

If you never had StarLab, you missed out in a way that I cannot really even begin to explain to you. StarLab was the most amazing thing that ever happened to my elementary school self. It was this big, silvery inflatable dome that (in my day, though apparently not anymore) looked like it was made of duct tape. And your whole class would crawl inside and sit around the edges, while in the middle there was a projector, and it would project the night sky onto the ceiling of the dome. They could rotate it to show you the night sky at all different times of year, and if you were doing a mythology unit (we always seemed to be), they could connect the dots of the constellations, which again, if you haven't seen it, you can't appreciate how incredible this was. I have moped about how much I miss StarLab a number of times in my adult life, I can tell you.

AND BONGS & NOODLES HAD IT TODAY AND I WENT INSIDE.

And, yes, okay, it was not quite as legendary as it was when I was little, because the little children were screaming, and instead of stars they had a video about weather, but it was still pretty awesome. It was all cool and blowy inside, exactly like I remember, and the sides flapped up like I remember, and the video about weather went all over and up and around. Different, but mostly the same.

Incidentally, prior to the Bongs & Noodles guy assuring us that we were not too old for StarLab, Robyn and I also made lots of jokes like, Am I too big to go inside that? Which is another change from when I was little.

Things that are not cute

2009-04-02T19:55:00.002-05:00

I don't really have a list. Just a critical remark to make about myself. So #8 (an arbitrarily chosen number) on the nonexistent list of things that are not cute is Being Clumsy. It is not cute to Be Clumsy. It is unpleasant.

I have been really tired lately, and also a bit stressed because of this thing I volunteered for at work and then became frantically worried I wasn't competent enough to handle (but it went fine), and I guess because of that I've been more clumsy than usual. I tripped and fell a while ago, and my phone fell out of my purse and broke. The other night I got out of bed to switch off my alarm, and when I got back into bed I injured my ankle (it hurt a lot but no bruise). And then last night I was walking into the kitchen to get my dinner and I tripped, and I fell into my wood chair and wood table. I hit my stomach, left hip, right calf, and left ankle on various pieces of wood.

There was SO MUCH PAIN. I could not breathe, and when I could finally breathe again, I thought I was going to throw up because it hurt so much. Sometimes I forget about Pain Thresholds and Being Stoic and all I can do is wail helplessly until the pain subsides slightly. And although it really sucked, I thought: Well, at least I will have some truly epic bruises tomorrow, and I can show them off, and everyone will be stunned by the size and colors of my bruises.

However, this did not transpire. My blood vessels are made of steel. It's bullshit. The only good bruise I have is on the top part of my leg, so I can't show it to anyone because I am too much of a lady to take off my trousers. I have the puniest little bruise on my calf that you ever saw. Like if maybe I was injured by THE FEATHER OF A HUMMINGBIRD.

Anyway, I've sort of strayed from the point. The point is, it is not cute and endearing to be clumsy. It is aggravating, dangerous to anything you are carrying, and ultimately painful. And aggravating. And every time I injure myself due to clumsiness now, I think about Stephenie Dreadful Meyer and how she gave her heroine the trait of clumsy in order to make her more real - which didn't work, but because it irritated me so much, it sticks in my brain. I fall over and hurt myself, and all I can think of is, If only I had a strong manly vampire with well-developed chest muscles to save me from my own silly self.

HOLY CRAP

2009-03-14T16:24:00.002-05:00

They installed a left-turn signal at Claycut and Foster! HOLY SHIT.

I realize that there is a very, very, very small percentage of the population who cares about this, but to me it is a tremendous step forward. Not because it benefits me, as I hardly ever go that way, but I remember when I used to go that way, twice, every single day. I worked out past the library, so I went through the Claycut/Foster light, and I always felt terribly sorry for the poor slobs trying to turn left, as it was absolutely impossible.

SO HOORAY! EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED!

Something that I wish guys would consider

2009-03-13T16:25:00.003-05:00

I hate it when you are out walking and you walk past a group of guys and they are all laughing, and one or more of them makes a comment at you. I absolutely hate it when that happens. When I was much smaller and I would walk past a group of people I thought might be dangerous, I used to think that they would kidnap and kill me unless I sang exactly the right song. I had to figure out what it was, very fast before I walked past them, and sing it loudly, so that they would not kill me.

Although I have long since grown out of believing this to be true, I still start flipping frantically through songs in my head when I am scared of people. I also start inventing scenarios in my head about what I would do if they attacked me, even though I know they aren’t going to attack me. I have to make a specific effort to keep my head up and not walk faster, so they won’t think I’m afraid. While I am doing this, and trying to stop myself from feeling shaky, I am also feeling really, really furious because I am a nice and clever person with integrity and many good skills like playing guitar and reading Tarot cards, and setting boundaries and not putting up with people’s crap. But when this happens I am suddenly not really me anymore but instead some pathetic little rabbity person that I sort of despise, just because a bunch of guys are laughing and one of them has said, “Hey, baby, how you doing, come over here."

I always want to go over to them and say, “I don’t know if you are intending to be flattering, or insulting, or you just want to look suave in front of your friends. To me, however, it is scary. And ordinarily when someone says something to me that I don't like, I say something rude back to them; but I am afraid to do that now because you are bigger and stronger than me and I can’t control what you do. And I have been the victim of a crime before, and when you say these things I remember it, and I feel frightened when I remember it. So, please stop.”

I never do it, though.

People whose fault it is

2009-03-09T21:12:00.001-05:00

So I just bought ninety books over the past few days, right? Of which about forty-two are books that I’ve never read before, but presumably I want to read them because I bought them. They are sitting in my living room in an appealing stack, waiting to be put on a shelf that has not yet been moved into my apartment because it is large and heavy and I’m not strong and I don’t have a truck or a dolly. And I decided very reasonably that what I would do is, I would read all the books I currently have checked out of the library, and when I had finished them, I would return them all, and when I had returned them all, I would start reading my nice new books. I figured this would take a little while because some of the books I have out of the library are huge and long, like the biography of Edward Murrow (which is awesome by the way), but that is not a big deal because my library book bazaar books belong to me and I do not have a deadline for reading them.

Today I returned three of the books to the library. I had read one of them a few days ago so it was well time to get rid of it, and I read the other two over the weekend. I felt like this was excellent progress on my part, bringing my total number of checked-out library books down from fourteen to eleven, a major step in achieving my goal of returning all of my books, a total library book reduction of just over twenty percent. And do you know what I did then? I went and checked out THREE MORE BOOKS. It was totally counterproductive, and here’s who I blame it on:

Michael Sera for being funny in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist and making me want to read the book and see how it compares.
Kirkus Reviews for calling Thursday’s Children “goopy treacle” – you can shut your face, okay? – and comparing it unfavorably with some other book about dancing, rendering it necessary for me to check the other book about dancing out of the library to check that it isn’t better than Thursday’s Children, which I seriously doubt that it is. And anyway Thursday’s Children is not goopy treacle and it does have substance. And charm. So there.
Also: the author of the other book about dancing, for being from Baton Rouge and writing about a book about a Louisiana girl. Way to make your book irresistible to me.
My grandmother for taking me to Barnes & Noble one time and letting me loose to wander around, notice Merlin Holland’s excellent The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde, and fall into a mad and relentless obsession with Oscar Wilde, and subsequently into lesser but related obsessions with gender issues, sexual ethics, and the Victorians.
Also: my therapist parents for talking about mental health all the time so that now I am obsessed with that too.
Also: book blogs for writing appealing reviews that deal with Victorian-era women who are unhappy in their marriages and go see neurologists to help them deal with their mental issues.

THANKS A LOT, Y’ALL.

(No, but really: thanks a lot. I am looking forward to reading these books. Especially the book about dancing because I am interested to see how it compares – not because I am determined to reject it in comparison with Thursday’s Children although I am certain that it won’t be as good – just because I like it when somebody compares two books and then I read them both and decide what I think. Like that time someone said Geek Love was a way better circus book than Water for Elephants and I read them both and decided I should just stick to Circus Shoes and never again venture out into the world of circus books.)

Christianity

2009-03-05T15:43:00.005-06:00

I just bought the complete poems of Emily Dickinson at the Book Bazaar (along with about fifty other books), and here's what the inscription inside says:

I hope these words bring you peace and love and restore your joy in Christ.

I'm not trying to be unkind, because I'm sure the person who gave this book to her friend meant it kindly. But you know, if I were trying to think of a book that would restore a friend's joy in Christ, I'm not convinced that my mind would leap to Emily Dickinson.

OBEY ME

2009-03-04T18:19:00.000-06:00

March 4th, the only day of the year that's a command. I've decided that from now on, I shall celebrate this day by being really bossy.

I just glanced back through my blog entries for previous March 4ths, and they seem to revolve around the general theme of irrational thoughts I have thought of. In 2007 I was complaining about how I seem to have expected that British rain would not make me wet because it was not very strong. In 2008 I discussed the possibility that I had stigmata. And in the interests of continuing this tradition of chronicling silly things I have thought of on March 4th, I will tell a story that I was initially thinking was much too embarrassing to tell.

You know how sometimes you see T-shirts or bumper stickers or whatever that say to do something more? Like, I don’t know, Walk More if the car is owned by an environmentalist, or – or, I know, like that Improv Everywhere scene they did about Look Up More. You know what I’m talking about? Well, every time I see a bumper sticker for St. Thomas More, that’s what I think they’re saying. St. Thomas More. Like More St. Thomas! The world has a dearth of St. Thomas lovin’!

I have had more and more sympathy with St. Thomas as I’ve gotten older and older. If I went out to get pizza and beer, and then I came back to see my friends who were in hiding because they had been affiliated with a recently-executed political criminal type, and they were like OUR RECENTLY EXECUTED FRIEND JUST VISITED US AND HE IS BACK FROM THE DEAD, I would also not be inclined to believe them. I would probably say “Yeah, okay, guys,” and discreetly conceal the beer from them because I would think that whatever they were on, it would probably be better not to mix it with alcohol. I get the point Jesus was making about faith, but all the same I can’t help feeling that St. Thomas’s reaction was the only sane one for a person to have – and furthermore, I don’t think it’s nice for Jesus to be singling out St. Thomas and fussing at him, because none of the other disciples were taking anything on faith; they just happened to be there when Jesus showed up the first time.

I think Jesus may have had some other problem with Thomas. Maybe he was mad that Thomas didn’t come to dinner with the rest of the disciples the night Jesus was there; and sure, Jesus knew that Thomas probably just needed a break from spending tons and tons of time with all the disciples, and he knew it was unreasonable to be mad at Thomas for not being there when made his grand entrance, but he still felt kind of hurt even though it was irrational and he knew it was. So he came up with this business about blessed be those who have not seen and have believed?

(Oh my God, look at this Caravaggio picture – this makes me like Thomas even more. It’s a picture of him feeling Jesus’s wounds, and his facial expression is priceless. He’s like SHIT MAN I AM PRODDING YOUR RIGHT LUNG!)

But I like Thomas in general. I like it how Jesus is like “Y’all know where I’m going,” and Thomas is like, “Um, no, we don’t, dude.” And I like it how Jesus wants to go back to Judaea to see Lazarus all dead, even though the Jews tried to stone him there one time, and the other disciples are all We don’t want to, it is frightening, and Thomas is all, Come on, guys, act like proper disciples! Let’s DO THIS. And that’s all I can remember about Thomas. However, that is a lot of good qualities. Thomas asks questions when it is appropriate to ask questions, and he is not a wimp or an idiot like a lot of the disciples seem to be. (Oo, and I just looked him up on Wikipedia, and Wikipedia says Thomas was a total badass preacher going farther than ANYONE ELSE WENT. Everyone talks about Peter, but did he go to Persia and China? No. No, he did not.)

All this to say that when I see a bumper sticker that says “St. Thomas More”, I imagine that the owner of the car is promoting intelligent, critical, question-asking, but still enthusiastic, Christianity, essentially saying “Ask questions! You can do that and still become a saint! Liiiiiiiiiike Thomas!” Which I support! Hurrah for critical Christians! And then I think that if they made one bumper sticker like that, they must have made a bunch which means a bunch of people have them, and I start thinking how cool it would be if I could track down all the people who have that bumper sticker and we could get together and have meetings where we would moan about other Catholics who were making us look bad like THE POPE, and talk about how much we like Stephen Colbert, out there representing for smart Catholics, and have fun Bible study where they would tell me interesting facts like how the genealogy in the beginning of Matthew is implying that Mary was sexually suspect.

As you can imagine it is always rather a letdown when I look again and realize that’s not the point the bumper sticker is making.

Keyboard shortcuts

2009-03-04T09:09:00.003-06:00

When I was a junior, I took this class called "Computer Applications" that was essentially all about teaching you how to use Microsoft Office. It was great. There were all these assignments to do, and you were supposed to do one every class period, but instead of that I did like six every class period until I ran out of assignments, and then for the rest of the semester, I would just print out a completed assignment at the start of class and spend the rest of the day reading up on whatever I was interested in just then - Scopes trial, French literature, whatever. This was before the Oscar Wilde thing happened unfortunately. Er, but anyway, the one thing this class did teach me - apart from reinforcing the lesson that IT IS AWESOME TO FINISH EARLY, which I have known since I was five but it is no longer any use to me now that I am a grown-up - is a lot of keyboard shortcuts. I am a keyboard shortcuts goddess.

Keyboard shortcuts are something like the elusive One Best Way my family is always pursuing, except that unlike the One Best Way, which is constantly under debate, keyboard shortcuts are indubitably much quicker and easier. Like when I discovered that Ctrl and K brings up hyperlinks, holy shit, that was a good day. I put hyperlinks in emails and Word documents all the time, and I used to hate it. NOW I LOVE IT. I'm just all, Ctrl K, Ctrl V, Enter, bam, done; and then I look around for a Staples button to emphasize the awesomeness (you cannot do Ctrl and K in Blogger although I deeply wish you could).

But sometimes keyboard shortcuts make my life hard. It more and more frequently happens that I accidentally press Ctrl and + at the same time. (The grey matter in my fingers evidently thinks this is funny.) For those of you who don't know, pressing Ctrl and + at the same time when you are on Mozilla makes the font bigger. I love that Mozilla has these handy shortcuts and everything but it freaks me the shit out when the font gets bigger. I do it without noticing ALL THE TIME, and then when I go back to Google and run a search (Alt and Home, I love you, Firefox), and discover that the font size is too big, I have a humongous internal tantrum. Like this: OH MY GOD GOOGLE IS RUINED SOMETHING HAS HAPPENED TO GOOGLE AND IT IS RUINED FOREVER MY PLEASING FONT SIZE IS GONE OH GOD OH GOD NOTHING GOOD WILL EVER HAPPEN AGAIN.

As you see I am very emotional about this. I use Google all the time, and it turns out I am deeply invested in maintaining its regular font size. I just can't press Ctrl and - fast enough, and then I have to collapse against my computer desk for a little while, in relief that the world has been restored to normalcy. I don't know why it's such a problem, as the font is the same; still, one size larger IT IS NO LONGER ACCEPTABLE.

Poison in my parents' freezer

2009-02-24T16:44:00.002-06:00

Don't know why. The bottle in the freezer looks like water, but it has a big black-marker letter X on it, and it says POISON. I felt like Alice - if one drinks much from a bottle marked "poison" it is almost certain to disagree with one sooner or later. (This is what we call meiosis, a much more pleasant use of the word than that business with the cells.)

Regarding the Oscars

2009-02-23T09:47:00.002-06:00

Hm. Oscar Wilde was obviously up in heaven thinking, Now, Jenny really likes me, and she has for some time now. She is pleased by the mere mention of my name; she knows many facts about me and tells amusing anecdotes in which I feature prominently. What can I do to let her know that I appreciate her public relations efforts on my behalf? And what he settled upon was planting in my mind a weirdly high number of names of people who were going to win the Oscars. Oscars so that I would know he was involved. Thanks, Oscar Wilde! Message received! I love you too!

Yes, for the first time ever, I did not do amazingly poorly at guessing who was going to win Oscars. There are twenty-four categories, and I got nineteen of them correct. (That is more than the New York Times predictor got right, due to the New York Times person thinking that Mickey Rourke was going to win for Best Actor. So foolish. They love Sean Penn and they love those biopics.) I screwed up sound mixing - damn it, ruining my reputation for prescience in that area - and foreign language film, and both the documentaries. Though I think the Hurricane Katrina one should have won the documentary category. You know, I think that based on my absolute ignorance of all the nominees. And I didn't get the animated short. I wanted the one about funeral people.

It was nice not to lose miserably as I normally do, and nice to be back watching the Oscars with my lovely friend Nezabeth, as we have not watched the Oscars together in several years. (Though they still had the same heartwarming MasterCard commercial about a lost puppy that I remember thinking was charming during the Oscars back in high school.)

I like Hugh Jackman but a small part of me regretted that a comedian wasn't doing it, because a comedian would have mercilessly mocked Christian Bale, and that would have been fun. I was disappointed in almost the dresses - people, what is with the necklines this year? - though pleasantly surprised to see Jennifer Aniston looking really pretty and not wearing black. Generally I thought people were looking lovely in spite of their dresses, not because of. Amy Adams looks like she caught that necklace at a Mardi Gras parade - she's so cute, and then that necklace kept drawing my eye and horrifying me anew.

Though I have to say, Robin Wright looked so beautiful it blew my mind. Every time the camera went back to her I could not believe how gorgeous she looked. I have never thought she was all that pretty, and my mum has always said that sometimes Robin Wright looks unbelievably stunning, and behold, I witnessed this phenomenon last night. Pictures don't do her justice. She looked amazing.

And Oscar Wilde loves me! What a nice thing to hear!

Clever and smug, but a bit of a loser

2009-02-22T14:10:00.003-06:00

So I was sitting at home today cross-stitching when I suddenly realized that all the Actives on Joss Whedon's show Dollhouse have names that go with letters from the radio alphabet thing. You know, Alpha Bravo Charlie Delta Echo Foxtrot - well, there you go, Alpha and Echo, we've already got Actives called Alpha and Echo, and the other Active whose name we know right now is called Sierra. And I went investigating on the internet, to see if we knew any other names of Actives, and there was supposed to be a character called November (check), and evidently there's another one called Victor. This isn't a big deal, but, just, AHA! That was a rather clever thing for me to think of between spoonfuls of Counter Culture yogurt.

You know what this means, right? The wider significance of this epiphany? This drastically shortens the odds of one of the characters being called Oscar!

NOT ENOUGH OSCARS IN THIS WORLD. HURRAH FOR OSCAR WILDE!!!

Joan Wyndham (sorry, but you have to read this!)

2009-02-17T18:47:00.002-06:00

Oh, mercy. So Joan's boyfriend goes off to war, and his house back in London gets bombed, and he writes to ask Joan if she will please rescue his bed from the ruins and take it to his friend's house, so Joan asks his friend Ralph, who is a stretcher-bearer, to help her out.

Saturday, November 16th

Ralph is lean, dark and wolf-like with filthy clothes, untidy hair and a gap in his teeth. He paints when he is not being a stretcher-bearer.

The soldiers got the huge bed down from the ruins, supervised by a very gallant officer with a cane. On it were the same sheets I was seduced in. We loaded it on to the cart and began the long trek towards the Embankment, both pushing from behind, pretending we were a poor young couple who'd been bombed out with nothing saved except our double bed. It only needed a howling infant perched on top of the mattress, waving a Union Jack, to complete the picture.

Ralph is full of grim anecdotes about his work with the stretcher party. He finds he is beginning to look at everyone from the point of view of whether they'll make a good corpse or not!

Our conversation went something like this:
Me: I think our best bet is to go down Beaufort Street.
R: My God, I could tell you some stories about that Beaufort Street shelter that would make your hair curl!
Me: Or cut down Bramerton Street?
R: If you'd only seen what I saw in Bramerton Street the night of the land-mine!
Me: Or maybe Lawrence Street?
"Christ!" howls Ralph, practically upsetting the bed. "The bodies I saw in the Holy Redeemer Crypt in Lawrence Street!"

We finally reached Rossetti Studios and deposited the bed with the caretaker, then went back to have lunch at the Fulham Road Communal Feeding Centre. Burnt rabbit stew which was mainly potatoes and swedes, but it only cost 9d. Ralph leaned back with half-closed eyes and asked me if I was a good girl - he then suggested that he should teach me to play chess but I declined politely. I am v. suspicious of men who want to teach me chess - or anything else for that matter.

I love her. Love, love, love.

I have been very efficient today

2009-02-16T17:34:00.003-06:00

I had a dentist appointment (no cavities!), and I also bought my sister's birthday present (yes, a month and a half early; that's how I do), and I did my taxes, and I walked around campus which was nice because the azaleas are coming out and they are my favorite flower, and the weather was gorgeous.

And as a treat for myself for being so awfully, awfully virtuous and efficient, I have stopped putting off reading Joan Wyndham's diaries that she kept during World War II. Joan Wyndham is this chick who kept diaries during World War II, and the library has the first volume of them, Love Lessons. It's so funny - she's young and dumb, and her family's clearly insane, and she spends all her time trying to suss out her feelings about everyone she meets. And ordinarily I would feel a bit poor-baby about her, because she's only seventeen, poor thing, and her parents are crap, but oh, God, she's so funny. She says things like this:

The other day [Mummy] ran into Jo [the dude with whom Joan is fooling around all the time] and me walking down the King's Road together, and when we got home she said that she thought he looked 'very interesting' and she wouldn't mind an afternoon in the studio with him herself! Sometimes Mummy comes out with some really quite extraordinary things.

And as well it is so completely fascinating how she's being all with the sexual awakening, and the war's going on - I keep thinking, how clever of the author to juxtapose the two things in this way, before remembering she's not writing a story, it's her diaries.

After tea we had a long talk about masturbation....Just as it was getting interesting and I was going to ask him how it was done, another artist conchie rushed in waving a newspaper. "They've invaded Holland and Belgium!" he panted.

So there it is. We looked at one another. The war had really started.

LOOK.

2009-02-13T22:46:00.002-06:00

This is an open letter to film and television producers everywhere.

I have no gripe with you giving your characters asthma. Lots of people have asthma. But seriously, if you're going to give them a condition that causes them to puff on their inhalers every five seconds, do some research. Or if you really cannot be bothered to find an asthmatic person and ask how to use an inhaler, then pause for a second and think about it. They're inhaling, right? Which means that they are taking in the medicine by inhalation? So what the hell sense does it make for them to breathe out again straightaway after inhaling it? MY GOD.

As a point of comparison, you will not recover swiftly from strep throat if you spit out your antibiotics before swallowing them.

And yes, the timing of this complaint has everything to do with Joss Whedon's new show Dollhouse; but YOU ARE ALL GUILTY OF IT. And, you know, most of you do not make shows as good as Dollhouse. So.

Flashbacks to childhood

2009-02-11T12:46:00.002-06:00

Today at work we had to take pictures for our website, and when we got through I felt like going home and eating a gallon of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream. I had no idea I had such memories of humiliation from taking school pictures. I was joking to everyone about hating taking pictures, as I do, but then when it was really my turn to be photographed, I remembered exactly why. It was like someone had shoved me in a time machine and tossed me back to being nine years old. Totally against my will, I think I need hardly say.

When I was in elementary school and they would do our school pictures, the photographer would always click, click, click, get through all my classmates. But that never happened with me. The photographer (it was always a dude) would say “Smile for Barney!” which made me want to bite, and he would take the picture. He would scrutinize the camera critically, then say, “Okay, sweetie, one more. Cheese!” At this point I would still be capable of lying to myself that the picture was bad because he’d mentioned Barney and I was seven or eight and thus far too mature for Barney, and I had made a bad smile out of annoyance. Click. Examine. Dubious suggestion that we try it again. (Here my self-deception about Barney began to break down.) Click. Scrutinize. Repeat. I honestly don’t know if this happened to everybody – it seemed to only be me – but it has evidently left scars.

(I will say that my sister Bonnie always took ages to get her picture finished. However, I believe this was due to her refusal to cooperate, because I remember one particular instance where she irritated the short bald photographer so much that he turned red like a short bald tomato and screamed at her for five minutes before carrying on.)

I take terrible pictures. It is just a fact of life. But I feel very wretched when I have to take a picture, just me by myself, and the person taking the picture makes four or five or ten valiant tries to get a good one, then finally gives up in despair and assures me the one they have is pretty, which – I can tell by their faces and I know from experience – it never, ever is. I try and try to convey to them that there will never be a good picture, so they might as well settle for the first bad one and spare me the extended flashbacks to my childhood trauma. It’s pointless because nobody ever believes me. They always want to be all Oh I’m sure that’s not true (yes it certainly is true), and furthermore they think that they will be the one to change my mind for me by taking the most beautiful picture ever. It's sweet but they are always, always wrong.

Jenny's Choice

2009-02-10T20:04:00.002-06:00

Oh, God, this is cruel.

I don’t know if this happens to everyone, but it often happens to me that I will be mildly interested in something – like, I don’t know, code-breaking, or early 20th century science fiction. Then suddenly, upon the smallest provocation, instead of being mildly interested, I will be wildly interested (oo, it rhymes). It's like I leaned too close to the source of contagion, and bam, I caught obsession. After this happens I will be like a ravening fiend for a while, reading more and more and more books about that thing. Oscar Wilde was, of course, a particularly epic example of this.

So recently I have become wildly interested in World War II, specifically the Brits during World War II. I have all these books about them out of the library, and I’ve made a massive list of other books I will want to read when I have finished reading the books that I have already. Including a biography of Edward Murrow, which I really is only tangentially related to the Brits during WWII, but whatever. I cannot get enough of books about the British home front during WWII at the moment.

However. In my innocent attempts to find digital primary sources about Edward Murrow during the war (P.S. This is sweet.), I happened across the Harvard Library’s digital collections, which as you may imagine are not insubstantial. And I thought, Oh, hey, well, I will just glance through these quickly to see what they’ve got, and when I am done with the British home front I will some ideas about what interesting primary documents I feel like reading next.

I realize now that this was foolish. I realize the whole notion of finding primary sources that had been digitized for my viewing pleasure was never going to be quick and simple. I obviously completely forgot what sort of a person I am; viz., an obsessive completist who will not settle for glancing over any single collections of digital archives, and who will now probably spend ages and ages checking out the digital archives of other major universities and having this whole problem much exacerbated.

Be that as it may, you will just not believe what the Harvard Law Library has on their website. IT IS LIKE THEY ARE CALLING OUT TO ME. It is a great big digital collection called “Studies in Scarlet”, and it is a whole bunch of, I swear to God, trial narratives printed in the US or UK from 1815 to 1914, all relating to marriage and sexuality. There’s over 400 of them. Over four hundred Victorian trial narratives relating to marriage and sexuality. I want to French-kiss Harvard Law School. I believe it is possible that Harvard Law School has a crush on me, and has chosen to court me by making these things available and waiting for me to come to it. This is Harvard Law School’s attempt to do a John Cusack to win my heart.

NOW I DO NOT KNOW WHAT TO DO. I cannot decide which obsession I want to go with. It is early days yet in my British home front obsession: I have only read a few books, and although I have made a list, I have not yet acquired all the books on it. I could still swerve away and do the sex trials instead. (There’s one about Lady Colin Campbell.) Britain was so inspirational – but sex trials are fascinating and hilarious.

Anyone have any thoughts? I will be quoting some set of people to you endlessly in the weeks to come, on the phone, in person, via email and IM, probably on Facebook – would you rather it was staunch Londoners who will never surrender, or prissy Victorian judges who think orgasm is a dirty word? (No, but really though – during the Salome libel trial when someone said orgasm, the prosecutor was all “What’s that? What’s that word? Some unnatural vice?”)

Killing insects

2009-02-08T19:55:00.003-06:00

I'm not talking about cockroaches. You already know all about that. I'm talking about other things. See, when I was a kid, I read James and the Giant Peach, and James said about how you should never kill a spider because they are good and helpful creatures. This has affected me hugely throughout my life. Not so much when he said nice things about centipedes. Centipedes are awful and I wish they would become extinct because they horrify me. Looking at a centipede makes me feel like I will throw up.

But spiders, right? I feel so, so guilty killing spiders. If there is a spider in my house, I mostly try to ignore it, or else trap it under a glass and take it outside. It's because of Miss Spider. She was incredibly helpful and handy to have around, when they went a-traveling on the peach, and I have only killed a few spiders in my time, and I have never felt good about it.

When it is a mosquito-hawk, I feel guilty then too. But they freak me out. I can't not kill them because I am freaked out by just knowing that they are inside my apartment. That's really not an adequate reason for taking a life, which I also know, so when I am chasing them down shrieking battle cries and brandishing my broom like a maniac, I will alternate my shrieks between "DIE YOU VILE BEAST" and "I AM SORRY THAT I HAVE TO KILL YOU BUT YOU FREAK ME OUT!"

(I doubt that this makes the mosquito hawks feel better.)

May need to reevaluate my life

2009-01-31T21:44:00.002-06:00

I turned on the TV just now, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was on, sort of towards the end of it. And I guess I am emotional for some reason because every damn thing that happened made me cry. Mr. Tumnus came back to life and I was all MY GOD IT WAS SO SAD WHEN HE WAS STONE. The centaur guy, who I didn't remember from when I saw this film before, but apparently he was an important character because everyone looked really upset when he died, died, and I was all OH GOD HE WAS A FIERCE WARRIOR AND FELL BRAVELY. The Pevensies were all upset because the White Witch had stabbed Edward, and I was all NO NO NO WHAT WILL THEY ALL DO WITHOUT THEIR SULKY BETRAYING BROTHER? Lucy went around curing people with her bottle of cordial, and I was all JESUS CHRIST REMEMBER HOW IN THE BOOK ASLAN WOULDN'T LET HER SIT WITH EDWARD. WHAT A JERK HE WAS.

Then The Count of Monte Cristo came on, and I threw all my Kleenex at Guy Pierce (Guy Pearce?) in a rage, until I ran out of Kleenex; and then I cleaned them all up and went to bed. This is possibly the most tragic thing I have ever done, ever. Should've gone on the Abita pub crawl. (But I don't like beer though.)

Something I find entrancing

2009-01-30T21:12:00.001-06:00

Sound editing. No, really.

When my friend Nezabeth and I used to watch the Oscars every year, I always guessed which movie was going to win sound editing and sound mixing. I’m sort of crap at predicting who will win the major acting categories – this is because I make my predictions based on what I want – but I am brilliant at getting the sound categories. I called Two Towers, Master and Commander, The Incredibles, and King Kong. Also Chicago, Return of the King, Ray, and King Kong again. Yes, I am awesome. You may admire me at your leisure.

I don’t know why I’m so clever with the sound categories. The only thing I can think of is that I just think sound mixing and editing is about the coolest thing in the world. I watch making-of things so I can find out how they made the sound effects, and if I don’t find out, I feel really let down and sad. They use the coolest things – by which I mean, the simplest. Like for the octopus beast thing in the Mines of Moria in Fellowship, they took a toilet plunger down to a stream and swooshed it all around, and that was how they made all those noises. Or this one old episode of Doctor Who that had a sewer monster, they made all its noises by putting a humongous amount of soap on their hands and squooshing it all around in front of a microphone. I was saying to my sister a little while ago that I wouldn’t want to be a sound person – because I wouldn’t be able to think up ways to make the noises – but I would love, love, love to be married to (or best friends with!) a sound person, so they could tell me all the things they were doing.

Last night I was just about ready to go to bed, but I wanted to finish up one little thing, so I put on a thing of Doctor Who Confidential, thinking that I would just watch it for five minutes while I finished up my project, and then I would go to bed. Unfortunately I put on the episode that goes with “Midnight” – a damn creepy episode – and the whole thing was all about sound editing! It was so fascinating. It talked all about how they use a bottle opener to make the noises for the sonic screwdriver, and how they made a set for the plane-thing and knocked on the outside so the actors really didn’t know exactly where the knock was coming from. Plus they all talked about how hard it was to get the dialogue right, because huge segments of the episode have more than one person talking at once. And evidently what they did was to have each actor record his or her own dialogue alone, while the rest of them mimed their dialogue; and that way, the sound people would have a clean track of dialogue for each character. (I didn’t go to bed after five minutes.)

Seriously, sound editing is mad fascinating. Maybe when I am rich I will go and hang out in a sound studio. I will be all “Oh, yeah, I’m researching for a book,” and they’ll be flattered because they’ll think I’m about to write a book about them, when really I will just be there to see all the cool and clever things they think of for sound effects.

Why is it Thursday?

2009-01-29T17:40:00.000-06:00

Why is it Thursday?

I don’t feel like Thursday today. You know how sometimes it’s some day, and you just really, really, really don’t feel like having that day right then? That’s how I feel today. Every time I look at my calendar I feel displeased. Thursday. Bah. I would have changed it to Friday, just to make myself feel better, but I couldn’t because the Friday shoe is so ugly. I’m so unwilling to have Thursday that I would actually rather it be Wednesday than Thursday (setting myself one day further back from the weekend), except that of course, that would then mean that I’d have to have Thursday all over again.

For a lot of today, I was trying to decide why this should be. I like Thursday usually. It’s not one of those days of the week where I feel depressed. The Office comes on Thursdays. Thursday is only one day away from a weekend. At Essex I had Thursdays completely off. There are three books I like a lot with Thursday in the title – Noel Streatfeild’s Thursday’s Child (bless Noel Streatfeild), G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (a line that speaks to my soul: “We have abolished Right and Wrong.” “And right and left,” said Syme with a simple eagerness, “I hope you will abolish them too. They are much more troublesome to me.”) and Rumer Godden’s marvelous Thursday’s Children. Thanksgiving, the only day of the year that I get my uncle Mark’s wonderful dirty rice, is on a Thursday. British elections are held on Thursdays, and God knows I love elections. Both of the Brownings were born on Thursdays.

Well, hey, that really helped. I feel a lot better now. Thursday!

The headline I just saw

2009-01-27T17:53:00.003-06:00

I just saw a headline that said "Octuplets breathing on their own, doctors say", and my first response was, Well, duh. Octupuses breath on their own all the time. Oh, and P.S., CNN, in addition to posting this retarded headline that isn't news at all, you spelled octupuses wrong. Sheesh.

Exactly why I don't get my oil changed

2009-01-23T12:10:00.004-06:00

BECAUSE WHEN YOU GET YOUR OIL CHANGED THE PEOPLE TRY TO TERRIFY YOU.

They call you up and they're all, hey, I'm done with your oil, but oh, your tires are cracked and worn. And I'm all, oh, well, that's cool; and they're all, oh, yeah, AND THERE IS DRY ROT.

The word "rot" is not a word you want to hear when - well, ever, actually, but particularly in application to the tires on your car. When people start saying "rot" about your tires, what should have been a quick, cheap, easy procedure of oil changing suddenly becomes a big expensive undertaking in which you have to replace your damn tires completely.

Moral: Never ever ever get your oil changed. Ever.

The upside to procrastination

2009-01-22T09:30:00.001-06:00

Sometimes, when you put something off for ages and ages, you feel like you have accomplished something tremendous when you finally do it. I have found this to be true in a number of situations. Most recently, the issue of getting my oil changed. I have been putting this off for quite a while. I got it changed sometime last year, and they put a little sticker on my windshield to tell me when I had to get it done again.

Initially I really intended to get my oil changed when they said I needed to get it changed. Then the date came and went, and I was all, well, screw it, I’ll go by mileage, you’re supposed to go by mileage anyway. And then the mileage came and went, and I was busy, and when I eventually noticed that I had passed up the mileage, I started pretending the four was a nine – which it MAY HAVE BEEN, YOU DO NOT KNOW – and most recently, when even that didn’t save me, I took the sticker down. The sticker was only depressing me anyway.

Then I discovered that there is a Firestone quite close to where I work, and I reflected that I could just drop off my car in the morning and pick it up on my way out, easy peasy. I printed out a little coupon for an oil change, and I wrote down the number of the Firestone location, so that I could call and make an appointment. There could really be nothing easier than this. But still I put it off and put it off; and today, today, this morning, I finally called and made an appointment. When I hung up the phone, I really felt like I had achieved something. I almost wanted to give myself a prize from my prize system, but fortunately I remembered that that would be insane.

Tomorrow I will have nice new oil! Hooray for my little car! Oh, and, when I called up the place and told him what kind of car I had, and how many miles, he said, “That’s why you bought a Toyota.” Damn straight.

Betrayed

2009-01-21T19:52:00.003-06:00

So I'm sitting here, editing some stuff for work, watching Doctor Who, and taking an occasional break to watch a Tale of Mere Existence, the existence of which I have only just recently remembered, because I was thinking about the approximately twenty-second space of time at age thirteen during which I questioned my sexuality, and it reminded me of that video about a pickle, and I tracked it down. And anyway, I've been doing that, and eating pistachios, and I was reading the thing I'm editing, and I pulled a pistachio out of the bag and popped open the shell and bit down on what was inside the shell and IT WAS ANOTHER SHELL.

ANOTHER SHELL.

It was an unpleasant surprise, and I spat it out really fast, and it got on my coat.

See, what had happened was that a small full shell had fallen into a large open empty one. And upon reflection, it's not really fair for me to feel betrayed by this, because I am always so pleased to find pistachios in the bag that have fallen out of their shells. And this is the flip side of that.

The Inauguration As Witnessed By Jenny

2009-01-20T19:36:00.005-06:00

5:45: My alarm goes off. I shriek angrily because I do not want to be wakened from my dream. I am dreaming that I am at the inauguration and hanging out with the Endless. They are all in costume so as not to be recognized. Death is really cool, and Delirium is disguised as a fish, a thinly veiled reference to The Kindly Ones. I cannot find Desire or Despair, and it has just occurred to me that I must be one of them, since I have been being very friendly with the other Endless. Destiny promises that Barack Obama is going to be a good President. I crawl out of bed and set my alarm for 7:30, which is an hour and a half later than I usually get up for work.

7:10: I realize that I have not done something I was meant to do by today. I get out of bed so fast that I fall off, which I haven't done since I was six years old. I am much taller than I was at six, so I am undamaged. I get dressed and ready and go into work very fast because I am such a failure at work. When I make mistakes at work, I feel as guilty as if I had set off a nuclear holocaust. I have now completely forgotten about the inauguration.

7:45: I get into work and email my supervisor with apologies. After I send it, I am concerned that I have not been clear enough that I AM AN IDIOT. I hope I have made this clear enough. I consider sending another email to reiterate this point. While I am thinking about it, my executive director emails to say that she doesn't mind if we stay home to watch the inauguration.

7:46: I start fighting back tears. Partly because I am such an idiot, but mainly because I have remembered that it is the inauguration today, and I am very inspired by the historical and inspirational moment. I expect that I will more or less be fighting back tears all day.

7:47: I go to the CNN online coverage, intending to watch it while I am working. Adobe Acrobat immediately declares war on my internet browser. I will not surrender. I am determined to watch the CNN online coverage. No way am I missing this historic moment. Against the power of my need to see history in action, Adobe Acrobat and its PDF documents CAN NEVER WIN.

8:30: Adobe wins. I close CNN.com. I email my supervisor to ask if I can work from home even though I am a humongous irresponsible idiot. She agrees to this, and I go flying home. I feel confident I can get home before the Obamas can get from the church to the inauguration, because I will be dealing with far less traffic and security.

8:50: I get home and turn on the TV. It is very historic and inspirational.

9:44: Oh wow, oh my God, there they are, Bush is leaving and Obama is starting, and everyone is screaming and I want to scream too because everything is changing, eight years of Bush, the entire life of my political consciousness, and there he goes, there he goes, there they go, and everything will change. I have to make a concentrated effort to pay attention to work. My eyes are filling up with tears again. I am so happy Bush is leaving.

9:50: CNN announces that they are about to have their last commercial break before the inauguration really starts. Last break? Last break ever? I HAD BETTER TAKE CARE OF EVERYTHING BECAUSE I CAN NEVER GET UP AGAIN.

9:53: Fitted out with a catheter and surrounded by a large pile of things I think I might need from now until noon (both phones, Famous Amos cookies, pistachios, all work papers, other laptop in case this one dies for some reason, large box of Kleenex, Chapstick, four blankets in case I get cold, small fan in case I get hot), I settle back down to watch the inauguration and do research on effective schools.

10:02: The TV says this inauguration has the largest audience for anything ever. This makes me think of the episode of Doctor Who where Rose had a poodle skirt and the Doctor had a ducktail, and it was the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, and the TV was going to suck out everyone's brains because they were all watching TV. I become very paranoid that a similar alien is planning a similar plan, and I wish I had thought of getting my sunglasses when I was going around collecting things. However, I am not sure sunglasses would protect me, and anyway I cannot get up any more.

10:16: I was kidding about the catheter. I really need to go to the bathroom but I don't want to miss anything important, and they are playing incredibly important music.

10:30: Oh, CNN, stop talking about slavery. I will cry. I am telling you I am going to cry if you don't stop it.

10:31: There I go. Buildings built by slaves. Luckily my stash of never-get-up-again things includes a box of Kleenex.

10:40: They announce Obama. As ever, I am surprised and worried at how skinny and young he looks. But everyone is so, so, so happy. Look how they all wave their flags exuberantly. If I were there I would wave a flag too. Also exuberantly.

10:45: I like praying and all, but this is a remarkably Christian prayer that Rick Warren is giving. I wish he would desist. This is very Christian. It's making me uncomfortable. Please stop, Rick Warren. Not everybody is a Christian.

10:46: Oh, he mentioned Dr. King, and they are showing people praying. I'm so glad I have these Kleenex.

10:48: MaLIA. And SASHA. He just said their names in a really weird way. Sasha is praying very cutely. I wish Rick Warren would not say the Lord's prayer, particularly if he insists on saying it in a way that sounds totally silly. OUR Father. Who ART in heaven. HALLOWED. Be thy name. Oh, shut up, Rick Warren.

[Edit to add: Jon Stewart agrees with me. Somewhere in there. Around the middle.]

10:50: Aretha Franklin is made out of fabulousness. I have never seen such an enormous bow on a person's hat in my entire life, and I respect her so much for wearing that. Oh, God, it has rhinestones.

10:58 but really 11:01: I notice that my clock has been three minutes slow all this time. Damn clock. Drive you crazy. But look, this is the first (no, second really) minute in which Bush is not the President. This is hard for my brain to take in. Bush has been the President since I was fourteen years old and I started paying attention to politics. I can't believe he's not the President anymore.

11:03: Obama is about to take his oath of office. So, wow. This is it. Really, really, really it.

11:04: Obama and Roberts mess up the oath of office. I try to decide whether it is Obama's fault or Roberts’ fault. I decide to blame Roberts, because I don’t like him as much. I like John Paul Stevens. We should bring back John Paul Stevens. He didn’t mess up Biden’s oath, and he wears a bow-tie. Or Ruth Bader Ginsberg. I love Ruth Bader Ginsberg. I bet she wouldn't have messed up the oath either.

11:23: I am very impressed by what good sentences Barack Obama can make. He manages whole multi-clause sentences without saying something stupid and incoherent. I am just not used to this.

11:25: Obama gets finished with his inaugural speech. So that's it. Look at everyone celebrating. What a good, good, good, good day. There are no Endless, and I am not actually there, but - hahahaha, oh God, they just showed Bush, and he looks like he's about ready to cut a bitch - anyway, to return to the point. There are no Endless, and I am not there, but this is an incredibly good day. New President. I hope this turns out well.

11:27: I reflect that poets should never read their own work.

11:28: My mother calls me to tell me that poets should never read their own work. We are both rather tearful from all the inspirational inauguring that's been going on.

11:29: Tired of listening to the poet, I say “President Obama” several times out loud, to see how it sounds. President Obama. President Obama. Really? Not President Bush anymore? I cannot adjust to this, so instead I think cranky thoughts about Martin Luther King. People haven't said much about Dr. King. Shouldn't we be talking about Dr. King a bit more? Remember how he died fighting for this? I would like this to be mentioned a lot more. Like about every two seconds.

11:30: I cannot believe the poet is still talking. In the time that she has been talking, I have thought many, many thoughts. This is the longest poem ever. I have never heard such a long poem. I start counting how many different thoughts I will have before she finishes talking, but this soon gets boring, so I just wait for her to finish.

11:31: Oh good. She is done. Finally.

11:32: The benediction guy has an awesome voice. I could listen to benediction guy all day. I hope benediction guy never stops giving his benediction. What a great voice. It is still very Christian. Why is everything so Christian all the time? Not everybody is Christian.

11:37: They sing the national anthem. I love the national anthem. I don't care what Tony Kushner says! I cry while watching everyone sing the national anthem.

11:40: Someone has just said that Bush is being taken to a helicopter and into retirement. I don’t think I have ever heard such a beautiful sentence. Taken to a helicopter and into retirement.

11:43: I suddenly remember that I needed the loo an hour ago, and notice that now it is a total emergency. I still don’t want to get up but I guess I have to. I spot John Kerry on the television. I totally forgot about John Kerry. I am still kind of mad at John Kerry for losing the election in 2004. Okay, I’m going.

11:46: I feel much better.

11:49: President Obama – oh, I will just never get tired of saying that – is about to say goodbye to Former President Bush – again, I will never get tired of saying that. The CNN announcer says, “The Bushes are gone. They’re packed up, they’re out of there, and they’re moving back to Texas.” What a wonderful thing for them to say. They should say it again. In fact they should always say it.

11:54: The Bushes fly away in a helicopter. It is very, very easy. They get in the helicopter, and the helicopter flies them away. I feel a little annoyed about this, like Dorothy at the end of The Wizard of Oz – after so much stress and turmoil, it was that easy to sort everything out again? All we had to do was put them in a helicopter, and the helicopter would take them away? WHY DID WE NOT DO THIS YEARS AGO? I sulk about this.

11:55: The Obamas and the Bidens wave goodbye, reminding me that I should not be sulking but rejoicing. Due to the historicness and inspirationalness of the day.

Did you know this was possible?

2009-01-18T11:06:00.002-06:00

I was cross-stitching, right? With a cross-stitching needle? And the cross-stitching thread? And what happened? What happened? I WILL TELL YOU WHAT HAPPENED. My needle SNAPPED. Snapped in TWO.

I didn't make that up. Did you know that a cross-stitching needle could just randomly snap in two? I thought I felt something snap, and then I was all, Oh, Jenny, don't be silly, your needle did not snap, you ridiculous girl, that's impossible, and then a second later, I was holding half a needle.

JOIN ME

2009-01-14T16:19:00.000-06:00

No, I mean it. Seriously. Join me. They’re going to stop making it again if you don’t join me and I CANNOT TAKE THAT AGAIN.

See, when I was in England, one of my most regular meals was frozen chicken & chips, and I would also steam some broccoli to prevent myself from feeling guilty about how unhealthy this was. I would eat the broccoli first and then get on to the chicken & chips, and I would put cheese on the chips, and I would dip them in chili ketchup. God, it was good. I got the chili ketchup because I was dying for something spicy, and because if I got chili ketchup, my entire meal (apart from the broccoli which didn’t count) would begin with ch.

And then they stopped making it. They just, they just stopped. It was just gone. One day I went to Tesco and found no chili ketchup. I thought it was a one-time aberration, but when I went on the website for Heinz, it became clear that they had discontinued the chili ketchup. My chili ketchup. I never recovered from the blow. I bought some stuff that claimed to be spicy ketchup, but it just wasn’t the same. (My mouth is watering, thinking about chili ketchup.)

But! Recently! They have started it again! They are no longer calling it chili ketchup, which is fine because I say chicken and fries now, as I am back in America, so my ch-meal was already shot to hell. They call it Hot ‘n’ Spicy Ketchup, or something like that, but anyway, nobody seems to know about it. And I wish they would know! I’m afraid Heinz will realize nobody knows about it, and just stop making it. I lost it once and I do not want to lose it again! Every time I buy it at the store, the cashier examines it suspiciously, and I assure him or her of its wondrous merits. I wish I could launch a joyous PR campaign about how joyously delicious the spicy ketchup is. MUCH MORE JOYOUS THAN NORMAL BLAH BORING KETCHUP.

I've always wanted synesthesia

2009-01-09T14:23:00.005-06:00

It’s always been just one more thing to be jealous of Nabokov about – which, believe you me, I’m already jealous enough of Nabokov. But my sister just emailed me some things about ordinal linguistic personification. I never knew that this phenomenon a) has a name; and b) is a form of synesthesia. Did you? It’s fascinating!

I do not have this with numbers. It's all about months and days. Some months and days are just better than others, and the reason is that the nice ones are nice and the bad ones are bad. For instance, I always like Friday better than Saturday, even though I work Fridays and not Saturdays. Friday is a clever, arty, interesting girl day (Friday is the only day that reminds me of a letter (C)); and Saturday is a loud boisterous shouty boy day. Like the Ghost of Christmas Present. You really have to be in the mood for loud and boisterous and shouty, which is why I sleep late on Saturdays (but not usually Sundays) and try to fill up my day with people and things, so I won’t have to be alone with Saturday. Doing nothing all day on Saturday gives me a headache. Doing nothing on Sunday is soothing. Sunday and Friday are my favorite girl days. (Monday is very nice, but I feel so sorry for poor little insecure Monday that I can’t get comfortable with it.) Tuesday and Thursday are my favorite boy days – Tuesday has depths to plumb, and Thursday is an expert on dozens of things – but Wednesday, which is diffident, not so much.

I would advise April and October against living with each other even though they are good friends. February has a good sense of humor and deadpan delivery. June is cocky, but July is arrogant and they always try to outdo each other. August is one of those people that are really really nice but you can never think of anything to talk to them about for some reason. December is gracious, and November does not have time for you.

I have always tried to repress this, because it seemed self-consciously whimsical (nothing worse than self-conscious whimsy - I mean, apart from the dozens of things that are much much worse than self-conscious whimsy, like pretentiousness and genocide), and also because people tend to think you are insane if you tell them things like November does not have time for you. But see, I didn't need to bother. It's ordinal linguistic personification.

I was just reading what some other people who have OLP were saying about months, and it's totally different to mine. It says August is "a boy among girls". Ridiculous. August is definitely a girl. July is a boy (June too), but September is a girl. September is cool and fun and thinks of interesting things to do. Oh, but wow, this person with letters has exactly my same ones for J and K - "J [is] male; appearing jocular, but with strength of character; K [is] female; quiet, responsible…” Weeeeeeeird. Oo, and here's another one, that says K is energetic and bubbly but not always approachable, which is completely wrong.

Resolution for 2009

2009-01-06T09:18:00.002-06:00

Pay better attention.

(I broke all my New Year's resolutions last year. This year I am only making one, and I am making one that doesn't have measurable outcomes, which means that I can never feel I've broken it. So there.)

My new obsession

2009-01-05T18:53:00.005-06:00

Watching the population clock on the US Census Bureau website. The clock updates every minute, so you can see how many babies are being born in each minute. You can see it for the United States and for the entire world. It is so fascinating. I’m not even kidding.

I was watching Arrested Development after work today, and it occurred to me that I wanted to find out some information from a recent census (educational attainment by state, if you’re interested), so I went to the website. And there was the population clock, in the upper right-hand corner. I’m enthralled.

Because every single minute, it changes. Which means that at the end of every minute, all these babies have been born, brand new babies, which is fascinating all by itself, because you know, a minute ago they were still living inside of another person, and now, this minute, here they are, whole independent people who will eventually walk and talk and have affairs and jobs and illnesses and brilliant successes. (And yes, I realize how cheesy this sounds, but I can’t help it, that notion is so remarkable.) I find myself wanting to do Tarot card readings for all the new babies, to see what’s going to happen, but I can’t, there are too many of them. Every minute, more babies born. Wow. I only remembered Arrested Development when the credits rolled, at which point I realized I had missed the entire episode. Something about "Afternoon Delight".

The only way this could be more fascinating was if it had one for deaths as well. But the clock never loses numbers, because it updates every minute, so if anyone’s dying, it’s being counted out by the babies being born. I suppose this is probably a good thing. Imagine my chagrin if I had to choose two separate clocks to look at, maybe one at each side of the page. My eyes would get tired looking back and forth. The US and world population clocks are right on top of each other, and there are only two of them, so it’s no problem.

Also of note: When I start reading US Census Bureau reports, I sometimes start wondering about statistics that don’t matter. In particular I often wonder how many times a word or name crops up in a book. This is something I worry about because I write, and I get nervous about using words I like too many times. Or sometimes I just feel like finding an average number of times a certain common word is used in a certain number of bestselling books, like how many times on average do the current NY Times bestsellers use “good” as opposed to “bad”. ("Good" appears on an average of 23.7% of NY times bestseller pages (the top ten hardback fiction and the top ten paperback fiction), and "bad" appears on 8.3% of NY times bestseller pages. Just After Sunset by Stephen King has the highest percentage of "good" - 36.4% of pages; while The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz has the highest percentage of "bad" - 15.6% of pages. In case you were interested. Though I suspect that nobody in the world is interested in that information.)

(Incidentally, Martin Millar says he likes using the word "good", and here's the stats on that: Of the four Martin Millar books currently in print, 41.6% of the pages have "good" and 16.8% have "bad". For the interested (I KNOW THAT NOBODY CARES I CANNOT STOP MYSELF IT IS A SICKNESS), the book in which he says he likes the word "good", while it has the second-highest percentage of "good" incidences of all the four books, is still 23.5 points behind the book with the first-highest percentage. It also has the second-highest (by a far, far smaller margin) percentage of "bad" incidences.)

Today I remembered that my friend Laura had complained about Stephenie Meyer using the word “chagrined” too often in her Twilight series, so I investigated on Amazon. Results: She started out with three uses of “chagrin” or “chagrined” in Twilight (two should really be the limit, Laura and I decided, but we can live with it), then cut it down to one in New Moon (go Steph!). Then things started to go downhill. In Eclipse, the third book, she used it four times, and in Breaking Dawn, five. But the real winner is her non-vampire book The Host, which used “chagrin” or “chagrined” a grand total of seven times. That is many.

Since I’m on the subject of Stephenie Meyer, and I have my camera right here next to me, I think this is a good time to post the picture of the thing Vey made for Anna. I am so, so jealous of Anna. It is three-dimensional art which is already cool, and it is also an unbelievably excellent feminist palimpsest. I love it. The picture doesn’t do it justice. In real life it is still more magnificent than it is here. If you can believe that.

Recovering from Christmas

2009-01-02T15:22:00.000-06:00

Mm, it’s difficult. Christmas is good because I can spend money wantonly and not feel fussed about it. Christmas presents don’t count as part of my budget, see, because – well, no reason really, I just decided that I didn’t want Christmas presents to count as part of my normal budget. I had lots of fun Christmas shopping this year. Lots and lots of fun. Now I have to stop buying things. So depressing. No more presents. Maybe I will buy myself a few records, to make myself feel better.

Another point to consider: I saw a lot of my sisters this holiday. Now I will see them less. The ones that live out of town are back out of town again (sniffle), and the one that lives in town is all with the working and then going back to school. It is back to real life. I like Christmas better. Nobody has top secret gifts for anybody anymore. Anyone can look in anyone’s closet now without its being one bit a catastrophe. That is sad. We got rid of our tree. The Christmas decorations at work are all gone. No more presents to be unwrapped. Christmas is over until next year, which is a long long long way away.

Sigh.

A weird side effect of finishing TV shows I've really loved

2008-12-29T10:09:00.002-06:00

is that I quickly become absolutely obsessed with whatever story I’m working on at the moment. After several weeks of not wanting to look at my story again, ever, because I knew that it was so absolutely useless and shameful and should probably be tossed in an incinerator (God, I’m glad I don’t write these things out longhand because I probably really would burn them up when I get in those moods), I now feel like I’ve been given a shot in the arm of interest. Life is weird.

My sisters and I watched the finale of Doctor Who’s fourth series last night. Anna graciously refrained from asking me and Robyn what was so great about Rose, though I’m sure she must be wondering. We go on and on about Rose. Whenever we say something nice about Donna, we pause and say that of course we miss Rose and wish she would come back. Whenever we sneer at Martha – mad Martha, blind Martha, charity Martha – we discuss how much better Rose was. Anna probably watched the finale and thought to herself that Rose doesn’t even come close to living up to – oh, honestly, I can’t even finish this sentence. Anna inevitably thought Rose was great, because Rose is great. Obviously. Undeniable. It is like that Fry and Laurie song – however built up it is, it could never be a letdown, because it’s so clearly brilliant.

Anyway, I got home last night intending to go to bed early and sleep until seven, giving myself plenty of sleep before returning to work. I just thought I’d glance at my story quickly, to see if it was still as crap as I remembered it being. Instead of that I worked for an hour and a half, and then I set my clock to wake me up earlier so that I could work on it in the morning.

This always happens. It did when I finished Buffy, as well. I’m not completely sure why, but one of the reasons I decided to read Lonely Werewolf Girl (thereby permanently cementing my love for Martin Millar) was that he said he wrote it because he was sad Buffy was over. Oh, how I identify with that. Maybe the reason I am so intent on finding new books and films to love is that when I finish them, I am all set to write like a mad writing fiend.

One of the most dreadful things about my year in England, which, I can tell you, contained a lot of pretty dreadful things (as well as, be it said, a lot of really nice ones), was that I was depressed and not writing anything, and I had just finished reading The Time Traveler’s Wife and Jane Eyre, and I frantically frantically wanted to be working on one of my stories, and I just couldn’t get anything written. Every time I tried to write something, it was shocking crap and I practically had to print every bit of it out so I could stomp on it and spit on it and set it on fire in the kitchen sink. It was so unpleasant, like, like – I can’t think of an elegant metaphor. I can only think of yucky, poop-related ones. Never ever ever again will I be depressed enough that I cannot work when I want to work.

Contented in spite of work

2008-12-29T07:14:00.002-06:00

I was expecting to have a really hard time going back to work after the holidays. I mean, I like my job, but let's face it: working is not as much fun as not working, watching episodes of Doctor Who, reading a lot, and spending time with my lovely family. However, this morning I am sitting in my roommate's comfy recliner, working on my story, and listening to my Elliott Smith records some more, and I am completely content to go to work in a little while.

Now that I've written that, I've caused myself a small amount of discontentment, because: Why are there so damn many ways to spell Elliott? It's madness. I believe Ogden Nash wrote a poem on this subject. I used to have a substitute teacher in elementary school, who called the two Elliotts in our class "Ay-it". An original notion.

Christmas is nice

2008-12-28T11:06:00.003-06:00

Yup. My family is nice and we do nice Christmases. We like it when people come join us for Christmas.

Yesterday I put away all my Christmas things. It's always great fun to put away all my Christmas things, although in this case it reminded me how swiftly my bookshelf space is diminishing. I keep meaning to buy a bookshelf to put in my living room, so I could store my excess books there. Last night I moved my record player downstairs so I could listen to it more often, like when I am writing my story downstairs or washing dishes or cooking or covering books in contact paper downstairs. I was going to put it on the floor by the TV (which is the only place for a bookshelf in my apartment), but there wasn't a plug for it there, so I put it on the kitchen counter instead. (Don't worry: the counter's very big, and we hardly ever cook.) And all day today I have had it in my head that oh well, can't get a bookshelf now, my record player's there.

This is cognitive conservatism, and it plagues me. But I did a lot of things last night, and it was pleasant listening to records at the same time. I listened to my new (but old) Beatles record, and I listened to my Elliot Smith record, and I listened to my new Death Cab for Cutie record. Records are nice, and everyone should rejoice in their continued existence.

A nice thing that happened last night

2008-12-22T10:12:00.003-06:00

All my sisters were at home, and we were hanging out, and it was just like those nonspecific old times people are always nostalgic for. We decorated the tree, and then we turned off all the lights and sat in the living room and looked at the tree all lit up and pretty, and we had a great big moan about teachers we had that were mean to us as kids (Bonnie and I had a number of Ms. Leblanc stories to share). After that we watched an episode of Doctor Who, which we never did in old times, but we all behaved exactly like ourselves: Anna alphabetized the vast number of Archie comics we accumulated over the years, and occasionally updated us on her progress. Robyn and I exchanged woeful looks when something sad happened to the Doctor (which is always - seriously, Russell Davies, why all this merciless Ten-bashing? Has Ten done something to you? Did Ten perhaps MURDER YOUR MOTHER? My God.), and Bonnie alternated between stubbornly refusing to suspend disbelief and cooing at the Doctor for having sideburns and Converses and a sonic screwdriver.

And that was nice. Growing up is sad because these things happen less and less often. I get sad when Bonnie and Anna are away and I never see them, so it's nice that it's Christmas and everybody is around.

Glad I never knew this before

2008-12-19T12:41:00.003-06:00

Here is a piece of information I learned from Doctor Who. Apparently there is a set of numbers that are called “happy numbers”, which means that when you take sum of the squares of the number’s digits, and then carry on doing that for a while, the number eventually equals one. Unhappy numbers are numbers that never get to one by this process. Happy primes are particularly good because they are both happy and prime. They’re very, very special.

I have always felt sad for prime numbers, because they have almost no divisors. Just themselves, and 1. Poor little things. I mean, numbers like 42, they have oodles of divisors, and they can all play drinking games at the 42 divisor Christmas party, and the poor prime numbers have really lame Christmas parties where they and 1 sit around wearing Christmas hats and making awkward conversations with each other. I mean it’s not so bad for numbers like 7, that were never going to have a bunch of divisors to start with, because they’re just little small numbers, but imagine how bad, like, 1259 must feel. I bet 1259 has tried to convince 1 to unite with it so they can be 1260 and have lots of friends, and 1’s all like There already is a 1260. There can’t be two. It would mess up everything. And 1259 probably cries and begs (cause 1259 is drunk), and 1 feels embarrassed and wishes it could go home.

Whoa. I just looked up prime numbers on Wikipedia to find a high one, and I had no idea the world of primes was so rich and fascinating. Apparently other people do not feel sorry for prime numbers – or if they do, they are making a hell of an effort to make them feel special, like when teachers are extra extra nice to the weird kids in an effort to prevent them from noticing that everybody in the class is shunning them.

Anyway, this happy primes information is great. Now I feel like the happy primes are loners because they like to be. They enjoy the company of their good friend 1, and that’s plenty enough company for them. Good for the happy primes! They know what they want!

(On the other hand, that makes the other ones unhappy primes, which just strengthens my pity for the rest of the prime numbers. Poor lonely things. They’re at their lame-ass Christmas party drinking heavily and eventually passing out on the floor while the long-suffering 1 cleans up their vomit and heads wearily over to the next party. Must be tiring for poor 1.)

As a grown-up who no longer takes math classes, this happy numbers business is pleasing information. My birthday falls on the 7th, which is a happy prime number, and on my next birthday I will be turning a happy prime. (Yay me!) But I’m glad I didn’t know about it when I was still in school, because I know it would have screwed me up. Calling certain (most!) numbers unhappy is a ticket to my anthropomorphizing them, and that, my friend, is a one-way nonstop train to total math failure. Trust me. Let’s not talk about how bothered I was by that whole comparison of greater than/less than symbols to alligators that were going to eat the bigger numbers (why? That’s not fair! Just because they’re bigger!). If I had known that these numbers were happy, and those numbers were unhappy, I would only have wanted to give answers that were happy. If I got an answer that was obviously implausible, but happy, odds aren’t bad I’d have left it alone so it could have its happiness. Better to get one question wrong than be forced to look into the bottomless abyss of misery that would result if I did it correctly.

Oh, yeah, and I also would have spent a lot of time doing pointless arithmetic to figure out whether the larger numbers were happy numbers. And I would have felt an even stronger aversion to negative numbers than I already did, because they would then not only have been negative but unhappy.

Wikipedia says, “If n is not happy, then its sequence does not go to 1.” That is such a sad sentence. Poor forlorn little n. Oh, n, be 7, darling, then you can be happy, dear, dear, dear little n.

A perfectly acceptable contraction

2008-12-19T07:24:00.004-06:00

Yesterday I was busily working, and I wrote the word “it’ll”, and immediately deleted it, because it’s a silly contraction. It’ll. How stupid. Can’t believe I even wrote such a stupid contraction. Every time I write the word “it’ll”, I automatically pause and remind myself that it’s a foolish contraction, only to be used if I absolutely feel I must. And even then I should probably reevaluate, because it is unlikely that anything can warrant such a silly contraction.

THAT IS NONSENSE. DAMN YOU MS. LEBLANC.

See, I had this mean second-grade teacher one time. She was totally lame, and she didn’t like me. Or anyone that was smart, ever. She one time gave me a B in reading. Me. A grade of B. In second grade reading. AS IF. It was a serious blow to my vanity. And once I got a 99 instead of 100 on a spelling test, because she said “it’s”, and I wrote it down as the contraction, and she marked it wrong. And I said, “But you didn’t give it to us in a sentence, so how could I know which one it was?” and she said, “If you wanted it in a sentence, you should have asked.”

GOD she was such a bitch. Giving me a B in reading. Yes, I have a grudge.

Anyway one time we were playing contractions bingo, right, which was where she would say a contraction, and if you had the whole words written out on your bingo sheet, you got a little chip. Like she would say “she’s”, and if you had “she is” on your sheet, you could put a chip down on it. Before we started she had us coming up with contractions to use for bingo, and we had done a bunch of obvious ones, and I raised my hand and suggested “it will”. Ms. Leblanc laughed and said, “It’ll? It’ll? Well, I guess we can use it.” She had a very contemptuous tone. It made me feel like a great big contractions failure.

What a crock of shit! There is nothing wrong with “it’ll”! People use it all the time! I mean, yes, you wouldn’t use it in a formal paper, but since you also wouldn’t use any contractions in a formal paper, THAT DOES NOT MATTER.

I never really noticed how completely I have rejected the contraction “it’ll” in my life. I just spotted it yesterday. I shall stop it right away. Nothing wrong with it! No reason for me to have scorned it all these years! It’s a completely reasonable and useful contraction, and I cannot believe I have internalized Ms. Leblanc’s scorn to such an extent that I almost never use the word. I’m changing my ways, starting today. I will use it so often that I will be known for it!

I dreamed I was back in high school

2008-12-17T07:51:00.003-06:00

It was weird and depressing. Plus I kept telling everyone that I knew what was going to happen in the future, and nobody would listen to me. I said, "No, look, I'll prove it. Bush is going to get re-elected in November, and Barack Obama is going to be the next President after him, in 2008," and everyone was all "Who the hell is Barack Obama?" I was trying to remember if they would have said that in spring of that year, and I couldn't decide if they would have, and I concentrated on it so hard that I woke up.

sobs

2008-12-12T12:36:00.003-06:00

Wagamama - my favorite restaurant in all the world - is opening a third US location. And do you know where that location is, DO YOU KNOW?

IN BOSTON FOR GOD'S SAKE.

THERE ARE ALREADY TWO WAGAMAMAS IN BOSTON.

Wagamama executives, there are people down here in the South who yearn for you tragically! Do you not understand that I would travel to Texas, to Mississippi, even to Alabama, to eat your food, if only you would open a location here. Furthermore I would tell everyone I knew that your food was worth driving to another state for. Please, Wagamama. Massachusetts is not the only state in the union that could benefit by your delicious ramen noodles and chicken katsu curry.

Please, Wagamama. I beg you. Please come to Louisiana. Please. Boston already has two. They don't need a third. And if you are dead set on giving them a third, please try to remember that they don't need a fourth. Louisiana needs one. We know how to appreciate good food here, I promise you. Please.

The dangers of anthropomorphizing

2008-12-11T11:37:00.011-06:00

It snowed today! Totally snowed all over the place! There were flurries, and it stuck to cars and mailboxes and trees and the top of the fence and the grass and the streets. IT WAS AWESOME. I flung snowballs at the fence, because snowballs are fun to fling. The snowflakes were large.

I wanted to make a snowman, of course. But I didn't want to disturb the beautiful snow that was on the ground in the side yard:

Pretty, eh?

I really didn't want to disturb any of the snow, because snow is RARE, and it might not snow again like this for years and years, not with global warming, and we might be grown up. However, I knew that I was going to be going into work shortly, and I would have to brush the snow off of my car windshield, so I made a snowman out of that instead.

Aww, he was so cute. I named him Sammy and grew very attached to him. When it was time to drive off to work, I didn't have the heart to smush him. Poor Sammy, it would have been unkind. So I just left him where he was. Every person I drove past on the way to work, I wanted to lean out the window and shriek "LOOK AT THE ADORABLE SNOWMAN ON THE HOOD OF MY CAR!" (I didn't want his existence to pass unnoticed.)

And then I got to work, and I had to leave him behind in the parking garage. It was really sad. In the short time we had together, I had become terribly fond of him. I hated the idea of leaving him all alone to melt in the parking garage, but I had to. I figured I'd come back at the end of the work day and take the pennies and dimes away, and mourn him quietly. Poor Sammy. I took a bunch more pictures of him in the parking garage, so I wouldn't ever forget him.

He leans forward so beseechingly. I feel so sad. When they sent us home from work so we wouldn't hit the ice, I found his little pathetic body in the garage. I won't post that picture. It's way too sad. I almost cried. And of course I could not desecrate his teensy little self by taking away his eyes and buttons, because WHAT ELSE DOES HE HAVE? So I said a little snow prayer over his little snow body, and drove away in sadness.

Do not name your snowman. That is the moral of this tale. Rest in peace, Sammy.

My life reached total fulfillment the other day

2008-12-10T08:27:00.003-06:00

My friend Laura rang me up because she had a question about Oscar Wilde and she knew I'd know the answer. This was flattering but nerve-wracking because it would be so unfortunate if she asked me something and I had no idea what the answer was. Much like that time that I told her I would recognize what Angel episode she had seen, if she told me one thing about it.

However, in both cases, I proved to know the answers. It was that episode in the second series where Angel uses Anne's homeless shelter to mess with Wolfram & Hart, which is sort of shady of him. And Oscar Wilde was convicted for two years on a charge of gross indecency between males under that crappy Section 11 part of a law that was really meant to prevent sex with underage girls. Rubbish Labouchere (he was the guy who introduced Section 11 into the law).

Well, of course, if you ask me one question about Oscar Wilde, it is not unlikely that I will tell you a whole lot of more information about him. So I told Laura all about how things would have been different if they had proved that sodomy took place, and then I told her about some of the evidence that was introduced against him. And instead of saying "That's gross, stop talking to me," she said "Oo, that's very helpful for my paper."

HA.

Oh, and then, and then? After I had continued telling her stories about Oscar Wilde and his ways and his family, she asked me what was a good book to read about Oscar Wilde, if a person was only going to read one book about Oscar Wilde? Not for her paper but just For Life? I assumed that she was teasing me, because I am a big Oscar Wilde dork, but no, indeed, she thought that he sounded interesting and wanted to read more about him.

I HAVE BEEN WAITING MY WHOLE LIFE FOR SOMEBODY TO SAY THIS TO ME.

In case you're wondering, the book to read is Gary Schmidgall's brilliant and insightful The Stranger Wilde: Interpreting Oscar. It's not a biography in the traditional sense, but it deals well with everything, and has lots of interesting information, and furthermore it talks in admiring terms about Ada Leverson, whom I love. Plus, if you ever get bored with one bit of it, you can just skip on to the next chapter, because each chapter deals with a different thing. The one about angels and demons was a particularly good one.

The Stranger Wilde. Gary Schmidgall. It's excellent.

Also, happy birthday to Laura! And Emily Dickinson!

Oh, wow

2008-12-04T21:55:00.003-06:00

You know what's nice? When two completely unrelated things that you like come together. Like if - well, I don't know, I can't think of an example apart from the one I'm apart to give. But particularly I like it when a thing you have just become interested in or fond of suddenly appears in relation to a thing in which you have a longstanding interest.

I only mention this because Vertigo just re-released their Tarot cards in honor of the 20th anniversary of Sandman, and they are damn cool. Dave McKean did them. I love Dave McKean's art. I have never seen anything that Dave McKean has drawn that hasn't been cool and interesting and layered and a little creepy.

Behold! Aren't they cool and beautiful? Dave McKean should be in charge of all art everywhere. I wish I had a really massive Dave McKean picture to put up in my living room. It wouldn't match anything; but my furniture doesn't all match anyway, so who cares?

Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow.

2008-12-03T09:54:00.004-06:00

When you get impulses to do things that aren't really important because you have a small window of time for doing things in and you think they aren't going to take very long, JUST DO NOT DO THEM. JUST GO TO BED AND DO THEM ANOTHER TIME.

Last night around ten, I had just finished a project for work, and I had just finished an episode of Doctor Who, and I felt very sleepy, so I went upstairs to my room. Once I was up there, I couldn't decide whether I wanted to watch an episode of Torchwood or just read for a bit and then go to sleep. I thought about it for a while, and finally decided that it wasn't really important for me to watch Torchwood and make myself tired for tomorrow. Of course, being me, I felt like I should do one more thing before I went to bed, in order to make sure the day had been suitably productive, and I decided that a really good thing to do would be to find out whether the light switch in the hall (whose function I have never been able to ascertain) controlled the attic light. I thought that would be good because it wouldn't take long, and it would give me very valuable information to have for later on.

Yeah.

So I went into the hall and pulled the rope/string thing for the attic ladder to come down. Turns out that thing is not as easy to pull down as the cable guy made it look. Damn ladder is damn heavy. Needs two hands. And caution. And going slow. Pulling it very quickly with one hand proves to be a recipe for rope burn. Like, really bad rope burn. The kind that ceases to qualify as a rope burn because it has cut so extremely deep. But the pain signals took a while to reach my brain, and while they were still making their way through my nervous system from my index finger, I carried on pulling the attic ladder down, thereby exacerbating what was already the worst rope burn of all time.

My finger bled right through two Band-Aids. I thought of going to the shop to get a butterfly bandage, but then I remembered that butterfly bandages are useful for holding a gash together, which is to say, pulling two sides of an open wound close enough that they can think about hooking up again. They are not for assisting in the process of regenerating nineteen layers of skin. Leading me to the conclusion that bleeding all over my - in the order it would happen - coat, house key, steering wheel, and credit card in order to acquire a butterfly bandage from the shop would not be an effective use of my time. Fortunately the third Band-Aid did the trick, and quite rightly considering I put it on so tight that my fingernail had turned completely white by this morning. When I took the Band-Aid off this morning and washed it with soap, the damn thing started bleeding again. It really hurts.

I am never ever ever ever pulling down the attic ladder again.

Also, the light switch does not control the attic light at all. Unless the attic light bulb is bust, in which case it is just out of luck on account of how I am never ever ever ever pulling down the attic ladder again, ever.

WOOOOOOOOOOOO COLCHESTER

2008-12-01T21:55:00.003-06:00

...I just found out that the monster in an upcoming Doctor Who episode was designed by a little boy from Colchester. HOORAY FOR COLCHESTER! COLCHESTER IS THE BEST PLACE IN ENGLAND EVER.

Well, okay, no it's not really. But I feel very fond of it. And it hasn't got a football team for me to support, so I have to support its monster-designing children.

...Okay, I'm shutting up about Doctor Who now.

I probably am not shutting up about Doctor Who now. I think it is great. And I haven't even seen any episodes with Tom Baker in, and he's supposed to be brilliant. He has lots of hair, and Sarah Jane, and Jelly Babies. I got one out of the library yesterday, and I shall watch it tomorrow or sometime that is not tomorrow but is soon. So if you have not yet watched any Doctor Who, I think that you should come over to my place tomorrow or soon and watch Tom Baker with me.

Sorry - is the question how did I get to be so awesome?

2008-11-29T11:49:00.005-06:00

So I was trying to figure out whether you call Papa Murphy's in advance to order a pizza or just go pick it up there, right, and I was having a hard time working out which it was from the website, so I checked their FAQs, and it is definitely the funniest FAQs of all time. The questions are like: Your sausage is so delicious! Why? and Your mushrooms are so flavorful! How do you manage to create such delicious mushrooms? and Why is everything on your menu so insanely amazing when other pizza places have menu items that are not insanely amazing?

I swear. That's exactly what the FAQs are like. See?

Heeheehee. Oh, and you know what else awes me with its insane awesomeness? DOCTOR WHO, THAT IS WHAT. I'm watching an episode from the late sixties right now, and it contains a sweet Scottish guy called Jamie, and the actor's real name is Frazer, and he wears a kilt all over the place and is stirred and moved by the sound of bagpipes a-playing. I am in total love with Doctor Who and I want to marry it and have its babies. I feel a bit like - for those of you who have been clever enough to read Forever Rose - I feel like this, when she first reads The Once and Future King:

It was hours later when I put that book down again, and the drumming had stopped and the telephone was ringing and my brain had the sort of dazed feeling you get when you wake from a very vivid dream.

So that's what they were talking about, Saffy and Sarah, and Kiran and Molly and Miss Farley and Daddy and Indigo and Sarah's parents and even the Unlovable Mr. Spencer.

Reading!

Well, that is just what I feel like watching Doctor Who. So that's what they were talking about, every British adult who has ever been interviewed in modern times. Doctor Who! It is brilliant! Of course they would all be madly in love with it because it is TOTALLY TOTALLY BRILLIANT. Sometimes there are alien cat doctors keeping poor humans prisoner; and sometimes there are Dalek robot-things that want to exterminate everybody; and sometimes there is Sir Lancelot and Madame de Pompadour and the Doctor and Rose have a bet on that Rose can get Queen Victoria to say "We are not amused". YOU JUST DO NOT KNOW WHAT THERE WILL BE.

This is not unlike discovering a new author that I totally adore who has written dozens of books. Like when I first discovered Diana Wynne Jones, only I wasn't old enough to appreciate what a rare and beautiful phenomenon it was. Or when I first decided to quit being a snob and read the Sandman, and there were all ten volumes of it left for me to read. Well, this is just like that. Only way vaster (not better, just more), because there are 751 episodes of Doctor Who in its glorious history, of which 108 are lost, so that's still 643 (is that right? I can't count) episodes for me to watch. Well, fewer than that because I've watched some now. But whatever. There are hundreds!

Which is to say that if I were going to do a Doctor Who FAQ, it would go like this. Why is the Scottish kilt guy so awesome? Why is Patrick Troughton so awesome? Why is Tom Baker so awesome? (Hello, Jelly Babies? Marry me, Britain!) Why are David Tennant and Billie Piper so ridiculously awesome? Why did something so amazing happen as that the Doctor flung a sword up in the air and said that a sword rearranged was words, and when the sword fell back down it was a dictionary? How did anyone think of such a brilliant thing? I want to be able to fling things up in the air and have them come down anagrams of themselves! I want to be able to fling - um - I don't know - flesh in the air, and have it come back down a shelf. That would be amazing. I do not like flesh and I do like bookshelves.

Sure, this marriage is going to last

2008-11-28T10:41:00.001-06:00

No, well, maybe it will. I'm just being mean because this makes me throw up.

Not all men were so disenchanted, though [with the film of Twilight]. At a midnight screening in Texarkana, Texas, last Thursday, a gentleman dropped to his knee with a ring as the credits rolled. To the delight of the screaming crowd, he asked his girlfriend if theirs might be as enduring and unconditional a love as the one shared by Edward and Bella.

I didn't make that up. I couldn't ever have made that up because it's way too awful.

An update on Doctor Who

2008-11-25T20:23:00.003-06:00

Sometimes it is pissingly terrifying, and I have to pause it, write a quick complainy blog post about how scary it is, and find out from Wikipedia what's going to happen with those terrifying little kid gas mask zombies that take over wirelesses and typewriters. P.S. It is very terrifying when a little kid gas mask zombies take over the typewriters. I really like typewriters. I don't want them to remind me of little kid gas mask zombies.

However, I do like the new American (suuuure) guy of dubious sexuality. I was worried he was going to turn out to be evil, but Wikipedia says not, so I hope he sticks around for a while. Not like that other guy I didn't like, who joined up on the TARDIS a couple of episodes ago, and then was gone almost immediately.

(I think it's nice when the Brits carry on being proud of the Blitz. Bless their hearts. Yes, Britain, that indeed was your finest hour.)

Edit later to add: The new American guy of dubious sexuality appears to be sticking around forever. I like him because I can depend on him to have his own spin-off show in a bit (hurrah!), and because he is always cheerful, and because he always has a gun. Seriously, the man always has a gun. Historically it's just been Rose and the Doctor relying on their wits to come up with something clever, and you know, that's not bad, they're both very smart, but now, see, now, it's Rose and the Doctor relying on their wits, and also - a gun! And if the Captain ever finds himself without a gun, he just fashions one, MacGyver-like, out of whatever happens to be nearby. It's brilliant. I'm glad Rose brings him back to life.

I have suddenly become much more motivated

2008-11-24T08:47:00.005-06:00

to watch all the episodes of Dr. Who with David Tennant that there are in the world right now. I am rather fond of Dr. Who. I have only seen a few episodes, but that's because I just haven't had the time to watch all the episodes of the BBC's most recent incarnation of the show. I really liked the episode with the angels where they keep flashing pictures of statues while David Tennant is going "Don't blink. Blink and you're dead. Don't turn your back; don't look away; and don't blink" - that episode was well scary but I liked it a lot anyway. And I liked the one in which the Earth got destroyed and everybody was too busy quarreling to notice. It was very Auden-doing-Brueghel-esque.

Well, the reason I bring this up is that David Tennant's tenure (hee, that sounds funny) as the Tenth Doctor is coming to an end, and they're searching for a new doctor. And again, I wouldn't care that much about this - I didn't when I first heard about it - except that I read on Neil Gaiman's blog that they are considering Paterson Joseph to do it! Wonderful Paterson Joseph! I adore Paterson Joseph! I dote on Paterson Joseph! Paterson Joseph would be simply ideal!

The BBC miniseries of Neverwhere has many imperfections, as I will be the first to admit. Hunter is totally weird, and the footage of the Beast is totally silly. However, it also has many perfections (aha, see what I did there?), including Mr. Croup, who is just how I imagined him, and especially including, and here's the point, the Marquis de Carabas. Damn, the Marquis de Carabas was good. And that was Paterson Joseph. I liked him because he was exactly perfect in the part, and I also liked him because, as Neil Gaiman observed, he's not very tall, but he's really good at acting tall.

Anyway, he's the odds-on favorite to be the next Doctor Who. I would love that. I would watch Doctor Who every, every week, if Paterson Joseph were the new Doctor. I would become a mad Doctor Who fan - I've been meaning to do that anyway - and get all the old shows out of the library and see what all those British writers are talking about.

But of course now that I've brought it up like this, they will probably give the part to somebody else. Pooh.

This guy I saw at Bongs & Noodles today

2008-11-23T14:48:00.003-06:00

So I went to the book shop today to do some thinking about Christmas shopping, and I was curled up in the armchairs by the escalators reading a book I was thinking about getting for someone (only to be sure that it was worthy!). And I saw the totally most excellent thing ever. This old guy who looked just like the chess player guy that happens at the beginning of one of the Pixar movies (I think it was A Bug's Life) came up the escalator and sort of lunged himself onto the second floor, and then he hobbled away into the music section.

And I was sitting reading, so I only saw it out of the corner of my eye, but you know how sometimes you see or hear things and you're not paying that much attention, and then your mind plays back a little video/audio clip of what just happened, and you're all, Something's not right here, so you play it back for yourself a couple more times, and those times you're doing What's wrong with this picture. Well, I was doing that, watching people on the Bongs & Noodles escalators in my mind's eyes, and in my mind I was humming that Sesame Street song about One of these things is not like the other / One of these things just doesn't belong / Can you tell me which HOLY MOTHER OF GOD THAT OLD GUY CAME LUNGING UP THE DOWN ESCALATOR.

He did. I swear. I don't know how he managed it, because he looked totally feeble when he was walking around, but the man went UP THE DOWN ESCALATOR.

You just have no idea how happy that made me. I started laughing, and I tried to pretend it was at my book, but since my book was incredibly depressing and you could tell from the cover, I don't think I was fooling anyone. The old lady next to me was giving me a look of friendly concern, so I said, "Did you see that guy come up the wrong escalator? He came up the wrong one. And he's a grown-up." She said, "No, I didn't see that," and went back to reading her book pointedly. And seriously, nobody had noticed. There were people all around, and they were totally unphased by the fact that that old dude, the one now hobbling feebly around the music section? He came UP THE WRONG ESCALATOR.

It was just like 29 February, when I'm really excited because it has made my life happier, and everybody else is acting like it's totally normal. He was really old! And he came up the down escalator! Just like I used to get in trouble for doing at Bongs & Noodles, when I was much much much younger!

There was also this thirteen-year-old girl wandering around, and she came upstairs and said "WHERE ARE THE REST OF THE BOOKS?" and went downstairs again. In a huff. And I kind of felt it. I really hate it when I go to bookshops and there is another floor, and I'm thinking, oh, wondrous, I will go up there and there will be vast magnitudes of more books. But then I get up there and find far fewer books than I was anticipating. It's such a letdown. That's why that Waterstone's on Gower Street made me want to cry with happiness. It just went on and on and on. I loved it so, so much. Darling, darling Waterstone's on Gower Street. Why can't we be together? Why does the world keep us so far apart?

Also, I saw a guy with a baby carrying around a copy of New Moon, and the baby was cute so I was watching them, and when he caught me looking, he put New Moon in his other hand and turned it around so the cover was facing inwards and nobody could see it anymore.

The best thing about having a regular source of income?

2008-11-21T15:20:00.002-06:00

The mad Christmas-gift buying that can occur! I made my crappy-ass week a lot better today by purchasing my very, very first Christmas gift of the season! And I know it's a little early, as my family's buying-stuff-for-yourself embargo has not yet gotten going, but I could not resist, and the gift was time-sensitive. Someone amongst my friends and loved ones is so lucky. They don't even know. The only bad thing was that I was planning not to tell anybody what I was getting for anybody this year, and I had to tell someone about this. There were reasons. Don't question.

But don't worry, everyone else I know! You will all have nice presents! I am planning and plotting and possibly scheming! CHRISTMAS IS AMAZING.

If you're ever feeling depressed

2008-11-17T22:33:00.003-06:00

Watch the Colbert Report after the election. I realize that from now on, every single non-rerun episode of the Colbert Report is the Colbert Report after the election - and that is very lucky for you! Because it is very cheering! And not because Stephen Colbert is funny (although that helps) - he says that he could save the country billions of dollars in health care costs with his Walk It Off Program.

Anyway, that's not why. The reason is that Stephen Colbert is happy. His happiness is infectious! He perpetually looks like he's about to burst into joyous giggles. Know why? Because Obama got elected, that's why! And every time I watch the Colbert Report which is rarely because I am rarely up this late, but today I have just finished a draft of my story and I want to work on it more and more and more so that's why I watched the show today, and anyway every time I watch the Colbert Report, it makes me giggle too. Giggles are hovering so close to the surface every time Stephen Colbert speaks, and it makes me feel cheerful.

I mean, yes, okay, I wasn't depressed before. With the story-writing and Christmas approaching and the good election and everything. So the Colbert Report may not be a real cure for depression. I have no way of gauging right now. But if you're already feeling pretty cheerful, it can make you feel even cheerfuler!

Oh. You know what else can make you feel cheerfuler? This, which is possibly the cutest thing I have ever seen. When she says "hippopotamus" wrong - oh my God. Just watch it. So, so cute.

Why Thanksgiving is troublesome

2008-11-17T13:21:00.003-06:00

In the first place, people are always saying you can't start singing Christmas carols until after Thanksgiving. Though this is obvious bullshit I have heard it many a time, even from people who like Christmas. See, but if Thanksgiving didn't exist, they would have to say can't sing Christmas carols until after Halloween, or at a stretch, until after Veterans' Day. That would be obviously better!

Thanksgiving is just a general placeholder for when Christmas things can't happen before. (A syntactically bewildering sentence there.) No Thanksgiving means no unpleasant deadline to which we would have to pay attention. Christmas festivities could begin whenever the hell we want, which they already do for me, but there are just so many people who feel bound by the not-before-Thanksgiving rule.

But I actually started writing this post for a reason that has nothing to do with Christmas, which is turkey commercials. When Thanksgiving gets close people start having these horrible turkey commercials with people doing lots of horrible things to raw turkeys. These commercials are uniformly so incredibly vile that they trigger my gag reflex, and I have to swallow frantically and turn the TV off. NO MORE RAW TURKEY COMMERCIALS. If I wanted to see that crap, I would watch the beginning of Pieces of April. UGH.

...I don't hate Thanksgiving really. It's always nice to get together with the family and eat lots of foods. Especially when there is dirty rice. I just wish people didn't get all hatey about Christmas until Thanksgiving is over. I get excited about Christmas way before Thanksgiving shows up.

Emotional lability, for starters

2008-11-14T15:27:00.001-06:00

I was driving today, as one does (unless one is tim and does not know how to drive because Jenny has not persistently enough pursued teaching one), and out of the corner of my eye I saw a bumper sticker in Democrat colors. Of course I automatically felt depressed, the way one does when one sees Kerry/Edwards 2004 or Gore/Lieberman 2000 (wow, that takes me back) stickers, which are just sad and awkward after the bumper sticker candidate has lost. But then I looked at it more closely, and it was Obama/Biden 2008, and it was like someone had injected me with liquid happiness. Imagine feeling happy about a political situation in the new millennium.

Then I got back to my office, and something reminded me of my cat, and I burst into tears. Well, not burst into tears. I didn’t sob or anything. I just got very choked up and shed several tears and had to pretend that my contact lenses were giving me trouble. Note: If I start crying in public, I nearly always pretend that my contact lenses are giving me trouble. I am excellent at this and you probably cannot tell the difference between when I am faking it and when my contact lenses are actually giving me trouble.

Today, speaking of contact lenses, I stabbed myself in the eye with the receiver of my desk phone. This hurts more than you might think.

Epiphany

2008-11-13T07:39:00.001-06:00

I don't have long arms! I have broad shoulders! I AM NOT AN ORANGUTAN PERSON!

You just have no idea what a relief this is. I have spent a large part of my life being irritated by the way long-sleeve shirts are never long enough for my arms, and subsequently guilty that in spite of my apparently freakishly long arms I can still not touch my toes comfortably.

But that is all crap! I've been so terribly wrong! It isn't about my arms, it's about my shoulders. I have broad shoulders. I needn't have felt guilty at all in those terrible years of P.E. and particularly in yoga, because it's nothing to do with my arms. I just have broad shoulders!

I'm aware this isn't exactly an epiphany, because I have always known that I have broad shoulders. I've just never made the connection between them and the long-sleeve shirts issue, mainly because I try not to think about it. It's unfortunate, you know? I look adorable in long-sleeve shirts, when the sleeves are long enough. They're very slimming, and if the sleeves are long enough to go past my wrists, they make my fingers look long and elegant too. So I would like to be able to wear long-sleeve shirts, but they just end up being so trying, and the elbows stretch out and drive me crazy, and I have to shove them up when I get hot, which is often, and then the wrist part gets stretched out too.

Whatever. My arms aren't freaks. So there.

Fond Latin memories

2008-11-12T08:48:00.003-06:00

I'm translating the Aeneid again, so I can get better at Latin once more. I need to find my old translation that I used to have - it wasn't a very good translation, and I spent a lot of time griping to myself about how much cooler a translation I could do if I felt like it, but it was handy to have around when I got stuck.

Latin is fun. It is lame that I have just spent three, almost four, years without translating any Latin whatsoever, considering how fun and relaxing it is to do Latin translations. When all along I could have been doing Latin translations to wind down after a stressful day, of which there have been many in the past three (almost four) years. When I have had my very nice purple Aeneid just waiting to be picked up and dusted off and re-translated.

My high school Latin teacher was one of the best teachers I ever had, ever. She knew everything about Latin and also about Greek and Greece and Rome. She had so much knowledge. She should get a shiny prize for being the best Latin teacher of all time. I would have stuck with Latin anyway because I really like it, but my Latin teacher made it way much more fun. Plus in junior year, there were only five of us in the AP Latin IV class, and James would sometimes make these amazing white chocolate macadamia nut cookies, and we would talk about strategies for escaping from marauding alligators, and we played Strike-a-Match like fiends. So that was fun.

That said, it is kind of liberating to be translating the Aeneid without my teacher. Because I can just depart from the literal translation if I like my way better. When I was doing the Aeneid on Sunday while driving with my family, I got to the bit where it talks about the saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram, the unforgetting wrath of savage Juno, and I remember doing this bit in Latin class, and I wanted to translate it as the savage unrelenting wrath of Juno, because that sounded cool to me, and my teacher said no. And even when I explained that it would be transferred epithet, a perfectly legitimate literary device used by Virgil on a number of occasions, she continued to not accept this as a translation. But you know what, you know what? I can translate it that way now! That's right! Nobody can stop me! I WILL TRANSFER WHATEVER EPITHETS THE HELL I WANT.

Oh my God this has been the best week ever

2008-11-08T19:44:00.005-06:00

Seriously, this has been the best week ever. I will enumerate the ways in which this week has been amazing.

1. I got a new guitar book and some really nice pens. I know pens don’t sound that exciting, but these are very good pens. One is purple!

2. I got a bunch of new books out of the library. Wonderful wonderful books!

3. I remembered “You Can’t Hurry Love”. I have always liked that song but I have forgotten about it for several years. Now I can play (part of) it on my guitar. "You Can't Hurry Love!" How have I forgotten this song? Hooray!

4. I am getting better and better at reading Tarot cards. Pretty soon people will hire me for birthday parties. I read Tarot cards for half the wait staff at IHOP, and that was great, great, great fun.

5. I wrote a crap-ton of my story, which is getting very very close to being finished. (I mean, a draft. Since I have changed my mind about fifty million things during the time I was writing it, I have to go back and edit out some things and put in some clues and make changes, but having the draft this close to done is wonderful.)

6. I got to go to the Bama game. That is right. I went. To the Bama game. In the student section. We lost but it was a pretty fucking awesome experience. We played damn well (except for Jarrett Lee - not one of his better nights), and there was this one particularly superb play where Trindon Holliday (I love Trindon Holliday more than any other player because he is little and plucky) was running the ball, and he dodged two guys, and then two more of the Bama people ran at him from opposite sides, closing in tighter and tighter, and he flung himself up in the air and through the ever-closing gap between the two Bama guys and he hit the ground and kept on running and it was magnificent.

7. You saw number seven coming. Lucky number seven: Barack Obama got elected! He got elected, he got elected, I have lost track of how many times I have burst into tears watching the TV or listening to the radio, and I have definitely lost track of how often I have heard and said the words historic and inspirational. I have been scouting the stores for a frame that is good enough to frame my now even-more-amazing-than-it-was-before picture of Barack Obama (so far no luck). I feel actually hopeful about the country when I wake up in the morning. I have a great big girl-crush on the fabulous Michelle Obama, coolest First Lady of all time. America is not terrible after all! We are not a nasty biting puppy! We are better than we thought we were! And you know how much he won? He won so much that he could have lost New York and California and still won. If he had lost New York and California, those bastions of liberality, he would still have won! YAY FOR BARACK OBAMA.

Jenny wearily begins making a "Save Dollhouse" T-shirt

2008-11-07T13:25:00.002-06:00

Damn network execs put Dollhouse on Friday nights from 9-10 PM.

Lots of sniffles in my future

2008-11-05T07:52:00.006-06:00

Every time someone mentions Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement in conjunction with Barack Obama's election, I tear up. Also when they mention Abraham Lincoln and slavery in conjunction with Barack Obama's election.

But hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray! I am so happy! Yay for America! Wonderful America! (Damn, don't know when the last time I said that was.) I themily wore purple today to celebrate.

Edit to add: I'm looking forward to watching the news today! I haven't looked forward to watching the news since, you know, ever. Hurrah!

Edit again to add: Well, except that time Cheney shot that guy in the face. But that wasn't the same as this.

Edit yet again to add: Farewell, Decider. We have not had a good eight years, and I disliked you before it was cool. I have journal entries from very early on in this millennium, to prove it.

I voted!

2008-11-04T10:57:00.002-06:00

...Yes, I still love to vote.

Plus, for once, my voting precinct had plenty of signs. For once they are not hiding from the voters. It made a nice change, not to have to fuss at them for failing in their civic duty.

Now with the suspense. I cannot take this suspense. I wish I could look up what's going to happen on Wikipedia like I do with everything else in the world.

I'm sad.

2008-11-04T08:04:00.003-06:00

I'm sad because Barack Obama's grandmother died. Poor Barack Obama. He makes me sad about his grandmother because whenever I see pictures of him with her he looks so happy, and when he talks about her being sick he always sounds so so sad.

I read that Catullus poem I love and once memorized for Latin, where he missed his brother's funeral and has to go far, far, far to see the grave place. I like it a lot, and I remember a surprising lot of the Latin. I really, seriously have to get back into reading Latin. It's just that I already have so many activities to do in the evenings - cross-stitching, watching Gilmore Girls, doing Tarot card readings for my stories (this is great, great fun), reading my Tarot book, reading Harry Potter, reading all of Shakespeare's plays, practicing playing guitar, watching Gossip Girl which has taken One Tree Hill's place in my heart, covering books in contact paper - and it makes it hard to find the time to do still more things. But darling Catullus! And darling Virgil! And darling, darling Ovid! And, oh my God, Cicero! Dear, darling, wonderful Cicero, with his beautiful elegant sentence structure!

Okay, that's it. I'm buying some Latin books. I miss me some Cicero and Ovid and Catullus and Virgil. What's good about this is, I'm not taking Latin classes anymore, so I don't have to read any shit I don't want to read. There will be NO MORE Pliny for me, ever. NO CAESAR. And praise our God of Heaven and Earth, NO MORE LIVY EVER IN MY ENTIRE LIFE. Vile, vile Livy. When I meet Livy in heaven I will give him the cut direct, and go straight over to hang out with complex-sentences Cicero and exciting-stories Ovid.

Distressing dream

2008-10-30T13:24:00.001-05:00

I dreamed that Oscar Wilde and William Shakespeare were having a humongous fight in heaven. Oscar Wilde said that Shakespeare didn’t have the courage of his convictions (meaning he was Not Really Queer), and Shakespeare said that if anybody here didn’t have the courage of his convictions, it was Mr. Lied Himself Blue In The Face To Avoid Prison, and then Shakespeare said “How didst that work out for thee anyway?” and Oscar Wilde said that he considered it the height of tactlessness for Shakespeare to be making fun of the unfortunate incident that led to his never seeing his sons again, and he would have expected Shakespeare to be more sympathetic since he had lost a son of his own. And I thought that both of them were unkind to bring up these painful incidents, but I didn’t want to get in the middle of it. I was just about to tiptoe away when I woke up.

A regrettable quality to possess

2008-10-28T09:19:00.003-05:00

is the inability to photograph well. I just take terrible photographs. Even my senior portraits look weird and unlike me. I think that in the history of time, there are maybe two pictures of myself I really like.

This is very unfortunate on days like today, when I looked really cute. I had on a white button-down shirt and a high-waisted black-and white skirt, and a black-and-white headband, and my hair was a little bit straightened but not completely, so my hair isn't frizzy but it doesn't look lank, and I was wearing some adorable black-and-white shoes that I got on sale at White House Black Market, and my purse was black, and I just looked really good.

But I can't prove it! If you don't see me today, you will never know how cute I look, because even if I took a photograph to document it, you would not be able to tell that I look pretty. I would look weird - my chin would look strange, and my smile would be all weird, and my cheeks would look like they were eating my eyes. It's like when I had my birthday hat, my piratey Ascotty hat, and I bought an outfit to go with it so that I could wear it back home on the plane (because I couldn't pack it so I had to wear it), and I bought all the pieces separately but nevertheless it all coordinated really well. And I looked pretty, and everyone was extremely helpful as I traveled, and they carried my bags for me, and they showed me where the secret lifts were, and they called me "Madam" - but still, when I took a picture, I still looked weird. It's extremely frustrating. Pray for photogenic children. For their sakes.