One of life's small (but really large) pleasures

Having ahead of you an entire weekend that will include chocolate cake and a party and might include swimming, and sitting inside your warm apartment while a freezing cold thunderstorm makes a racket outside, and singing rainy-day songs very quietly, and covering four new books with contact paper.

In fact that may be the definition of perfect happiness.

A point to consider

If life were like One Tree Hill, then Clinton and Obama would be having a secret affair.

Righteous horror

While I was waiting for that last post to load, I reached into my purse to get something out of my wallet, and do you know what I discovered, DO YOU KNOW?

The snap that snaps my purse closed (the boy side thereof) was cheating on the girl snap! With my wallet's girl snap! I caught them in flagrante delicto, and they didn't even have the grace to act embarrassed!

DEGENERATES.

I completely hate myself

You won't be able to believe what I did. I can hardly believe what I did. If Bonnie had been with me this would never, never, never have happened. I am the stupidest person in the whole world and I have missed out on something beautiful and uplifting, all because of rank cowardice and an ability to be too easily satisfied.

So I was walking back from class, right, and I happened to notice that one of the apartments in my complex had a board game scattered all over the cement in front of the door. I paused and glanced at it, and then I realized there was a sign on the door that said something along the lines of GET A CLUE BITCH (the, uh, the game was Clue), and then underneath that it said some other things including (again, something along the lines of) WHY DO YOU WANT 2 B ON MYSPACE SO BAD? and some other scattered insults.

Things I didn't do that I now really wish I'd done:

1) Take the close-up picture of the sign first, rather than doing the wide shot encompassing door and game first, and
2) Remembered to save the close-up picture after I took it, and
3) Stolen the sign (IF BONNIE HAD BEEN WITH ME WE WOULD HAVE, DAMMIT), or
4) Come back straight away with my real camera, not just my cell phone, and taken further pictures, or
5) Not waited for several hours before trying to call Robyn to tell her about it and realizing the close-up of the sign was gone, or
6) Been brave enough when I did go back to say to the girl walking purposefully towards the door, "Hey, you know that sign you're about to tear off your door in disgust? Can I have it?"

Seriously, that sign was beautiful and I would have swiped it and sent it into Found Magazine like damn except that there was some lingering part of me that was like, "Well, hey, maybe the BITCH in question actually really needs to GET A CLUE, and maybe it actually is important that she contemplate the serious question of why she wants 2 b on MySpace so bad", and anyway far be it from me (I thought) to interfere in what is obviously a deeply painful inter-flatmate schism between a BITCH and a COMPLETE LUNATIC, and anyway I have these pictures that I took so I will never forget this sign.

And it didn't work out that way. So now I've learned a valuable lesson: Steal shit. Crime pays.

Striving for authenticity

Okay, look. People are always on my case about exercising and they are always like Oh Jenny don't you know that exercise is good for you and don't you know that exercise will give you endorphins and pull you out of the deep depression you have sunk into upon learning that you are going to be forced to read Moby Dick and Walden again and also a huge bunch of Walt Whitman that you had managed to avoid up until now and don't you know that if you do not exercise you will develop nasty diseases and die?

But what they are FAILING to CONSIDER (because they are not reflective people) is that up until today I haven't had any exercising trousers. Like, I know I can wear big shirts to exercise in, and indeed that is an ideal exercising clothe, but I also have to wear something on my bottom half, and seriously, I had nothing to wear! I had no exercising shorts. I had no exercising trousers. I couldn't exercise. My hands were tied. As you can well imagine, the last thing I would want is to go into the rec center in non-exercising trousers and have everyone turn around from their exercising to say YOU GET OUT OF HERE AT ONCE YOU EXERCISE FRAUD and leap off of their machines and suppress me and tell me never ever never darken their doors again ever.

However, today I purchased some proper exercising trousers. I know they're the appropriate kind of exercising trousers because I have seen other people, exercising people, and they were wearing trousers of this kind. The stretchy kind with a nice solid color and then a white stripe down both sides. That's what exercising people wear. Now I have some too. I am no longer a big fraud.

LET THE HEALTHINESS BEGIN.

Things I feel smug about when watching movies

1) People's fake hair. Every time I see people in films with long hair that is obviously a wig or hair extensions, I'm like, Pfft. Please. My hair is naturally long. (I'm sure I'm jinxing myself horrendously by being so smug about it but I can't help it.)

2) Typewriters. Always. Every time someone has a typewriter in a film, inside my brain I am thinking, Ha, ha, ha, ha. My typewriters are much more better than your typewriters. My typewriters are more elegant and my typewriter that is portable is more cute and my typewriter that is old is more old and is indeed an antique. SO. THERE.

(Yes, that's what I was thinking all through Atonement. As soon as the typewriter noises started, I was thinking, Well, we'll just see about that, won't we? And when the typewriter showed up, I was not paying any attention to the dirty words James McAvoy was typing – the old people in the audience all were, however, and whispered urgently to each other – but was in fact thinking, Please. My typewriter is so much better.)

What Anthony Lane the famous and prestigious film reviewer says

Everybody knows the old E.M. Forster distinction between story and plot: "The king died and then the queen died" is a story. "The king died and then the queen died of grief" is a plot. Fair enough, but what Forster failed to foresee was the emergence of a third category, the Quentin Tarantino plot, which goes something like this: "The king died while having sex on the hood of a lime-green Corvette, and the queen died of contaminated crack borrowed from the court jester, with whom she was enjoying a conversation about the relative merits of Tab and Diet Pepsi as they sat and surveyed the bleeding remains of the lords and ladies whom she had just blown away with a stolen .45 in a fit of grief." It is hard to know what Forster would have made of Tarantino's new movie Pulp Fiction. I suspect he would have run gibbering into his study, locked the door, and hidden behind the bookshelves. Not just because of the bloodshed – all that brain matter suddenly appearing on the outsides of people's skulls, instead of working quietly within, where it belongs – but because of the equal violence done to narrative form.

YEAH. I AGREE.

And here is his summary of Titanic:

They fall in love, he draws her nude, they make out in the cargo hold, and then the ship, in a touching display of erotic sympathy, rears up on end and goes down.

My great-grandmother remembered the Titanic sinking, incidentally. And my other great-grandmother used to work for Thomas Edison. So.

First impressions

I had three of my four classes today, the fourth being a class I have already taken before in high school and had the professor for it so I know what he's like. Already. But as for the others:

1) My Unpleasant English Class Requirement where, goddammit, I have to read Moby Dick (again!). The professor for that looks like Dustin Hoffman. It's eerie. The more I look at him, the more he looks like Dustin Hoffman. Especially when he smiles. He also has a little bit of a look of David Strathairn, as Robyn pointed out, but mainly he looks exactly like Dustin Hoffman. He thinks it is very funny that Tocqueville made accurate predictions.

2) My Pleasant English Class Requirement where I get to read Jane Eyre! Jane Eyre! Please see my post-script for the thing I just realized about Jane Eyre and its impact upon my life. Well, my professor is very tiny and cheerful and got interviewed for the special features of the Sweeney Todd DVD, and we are reading loads of good things and then watching the movies of them. I'm excited. I am writing a short story adaptation of "The Little Mermaid" (or so I optimistically claim), and then I am thinking I may write my long paper on the development of the Remorseful Vampire and some modern uses of him. Including, if God is kind, my recently-read and amazingly trashy Twilight.

3) My Hopefully-Useful-In-Life elective. Our instructor for this has a face like a little boy, and sort of a little-kid haircut as well, so I keep glancing up and being like, Whoa, what the hell, who's this kid and where's our instructor? before I remember what's going on. Plus she wears kind of baggy clothes, with a big smoking jacket type thing on top, and it makes her look like a little boy dressing up in his parents' clothing. And at the end of her sleeves are two completely normal grown-up-size hands, which is oddly creepy and keeps reminding me of the Swedish chef.

So good things mainly. Hopefully.

P.S. Guess what I just realized about Jane Eyre. I never noticed this before just this second, but OH MY GOD GUESS WHAT. Okay, so my mother gave me a copy of Jane Eyre when I was about nine, I think, and told me that it was really good and moreover the hero called the heroine "Jenny" (which is my name). And I was all, SWEET! MY NAME!, so I read it (though actually he calls her "Janet", so pooh) and I completely loved it, of course. And my mother kept saying "Where are you? Oo, wait until you get to the end! The end is fantastic!" and she said it so much that I started to feel I actually couldn't wait for the end (especially when Jane ran away and took up with that asshole Sinjun whose name I just can't be bothered to spell correctly), so I flipped forward and read the end.

And that is how it all began.

I just realized that. Jane Eyre (and my mother) showed me The Way.

A post no one else cares about but me

However, I need to have this on record somewhere accessible by public interweb, because I am constantly trying to remember all of these things and spending a lot of valuable time, which could be spent doing other things like reading and writing a story and listening to new music and learning the languages on my list, dredging them up out of my unwilling brain.

I often find myself thinking: Neil Gaiman steals all of his ideas from Diana Wynne Jones, and then I can't remember what ideas he has stolen from her. And of course he doesn't steal all his ideas from her, because he is a creative chap and it would be very cool to live inside his head. Seriously, I think that it must be very very cool to be Neil Gaiman and have all those weird ideas in your head. But, he frequently steals ideas from Diana Wynne Jones though undoubtedly with her permission because he goes completely different ways with them and anyway they are BFF and I'm sure she doesn't care.

1) He stole the idea for American Gods from Eight Days of Luke. He said.
2) He stole the idea for MirrorMask from Charmed Life. I think a bit.
3) That's all I can remember but I KNOW THERE IS AT LEAST ONE MORE.

Well, this is why this post is a good idea, because I know that I will remember eventually, and then I will update this post, and then I will remember them forever. Ha.

Edit to add: Oh yes. Stardust and Howl's Moving Castle. It all comes back to me. That John Donne poem.

I TOLD YOU SO

I told EVERYONE. NO ONE LISTENS TO ME.

For many years now I have been preaching the joyous gospel of my own reading philosophy, which involves knowing the end of a book as early as possible. Books are better when you know the endings. They just are.

But there was this one incident involving the sixth Harry Potter book, which I have mentioned before, where I glanced at the end and received some information I didn't actually want, and even though in some ways it eased my tension (which was nice because I was the only one awake in the house in a shithole city (Frank Harris' home, incidentally) in a foreign country), it really made me rethink my whole policy of reading the ends of books wherein suspense is key.

Which is why I did not read the end of Special Topics in Calamity Physics. Although I wanted to. I frequently and repeatedly wanted to, and I kept telling myself, Jenny, if you want your first time to be really special, you have to save yourself.

Patriarchal bullshit, as I have always suspected.

I finished Special Topics in Calamity Physics with very mixed feelings – the end was brilliantly insane, but the middle sort of bogged down in some ways, but I seriously think that if I had known the end when I was reading the middle, I might have loved it the entire time and come away with a new favorite book. But because I got BRAINWASHED by the BULLSHIT PARTY LINE, I may have really spoiled that elusive brilliant best-thing-in-the-world, The First Time Reading a Good Book. Dammit.

Look at this! LOOK!

"That very morning your mother had talked to me of plans to enroll in a night class, Intro to Moths of North America, so rid yourself of such dour thoughts. Natasha was the victim of one too many butterfly nights." Dad gazed at the floor. "A sort of moth moon madness," he added quietly.

That is genius, genius, and I DIDN'T EVEN KNOW.

Or, oo, that bit where that woman came over and bashed things and it was too awful and I couldn't stand to read it, oh my God, that was not just an unbearable section of book, it was elegant foreshadowing! GODDAMMIT!

If you want to really enjoy this book, my advice to you is this: Read the introduction; then skip ahead and read from Chapter 31 ("Che Guevara Talks to Young People") to the end; then go back and read the rest of the book. My way of reading books has been proven to be best. I only wish I could have been proved right not at the expense of what may be a thoroughly excellent book.