damkianna

I am tired of being terrible at titling my posts, and so have decided to go the pretentious route: moderately appropriate song lyrics with no capital letters. \o/ I see no way in which this can fail me.

The reason this line applies is because on Friday, I had my first meeting of Music in Live Performance, a one-credit class I'm taking because AT asked me to and I am a doormat. :D It's not really much of a class: we go to the space where one of the five concerts we'll be attending is being held, and talk to the performer(s) for half an hour, and then stay for the concert. And at the end, we have to turn in some kind of journal thing, so that they can actually have something to grade.

Anyway, Friday's concert was performed by this man, who is pretty fabulous. The people in the course came early, and we ended up climbing up onto the stage and singing a piece of shape-note music with him, which was lovely. I cannot read music, but fortunately we went through it a few times, and that's generally all I need to be able to sing something reasonably well. (If we operationalize "well" as a measure of right notes hit, not quality of voice, that is.) He tended to favor a style of music that I rather like, although my favorites were the more up-tempo ones.

The reasoning behind the title is that one of the songs he sang during the concert was a version of the same story that is told in the song "The Cruel Sister", of which the title is the first line. His version was a bit abbreviated, in addition to differing in the details: the minstrel made a fiddle out of the dead sister's bones and hair, not a harp, and when he played it, it would only make the sound of wind and rain; the song ended without the minstrel going back to the family's house and playing the instrument at the cruel sister's wedding, and so the crime was never revealed. He also sang a version of another song that I know best because the Old Blind Dogs sang it, this one being "Edward", except in this one, the brother was killed, not the father, and, again, it ended early - the narrator settled for exiling himself, and didn't go into how he was going to let his castle fall into disrepair, leave his family to beg for a living, and curse his mother to Hell.

... Oh, traditional music. How so bloodthirsty?

I also got reintroduced to my own subconscious Eurocentrism; I experienced a brief and damning moment of surprise when AT revealed that she was not acquainted with Ichabod Crane or the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, despite being well aware that AT's cultural background is Viet, and she would have no reason to know either. Which reminds me of ( yet another time B has nearly made me blow my stack. ) Argh.

Still, it was not nearly as bad as ( the flag conversation. )

... it's only until May, it's only until May, it's only until May ...

In less infuriating news, I had two Harry Potter dreams that I only vaguely remember, and a third about spiders that was truly awful (one of them was huge and black and shiny and under my bed, and the other was smaller and kind of like a daddy longlegs but then it grew and grew and its body was all fat and squishy when I kicked it out the door except then I was trapped inside with the big black one-), all on the same night. I must have been sleeping pretty badly, to wake up three times, but fortunately I could nap the day after.

Also, despite having to study for a Hearing exam that was moved up, and slogging dutifully away through my thesis, I've still managed to get to the fourth chapter of the second book of the HP AU. Which may be due to the fact that I spent all of my classes on Tuesday writing in my fic notebook, and managed to get down a very pleasing ~2,000 words. I am such a terrible student. /o\ I also watched the first Narnia movie today, because it came through my Netflix, and, man, if you're looking for it at all, the Peter/Edmund just leaps off the screen and slaps you in the face. (Then again, I may be biased; most of what I remember about the second one consists of Peter and Caspian smoldering at each other and Susan's battle eyeliner.)

That was ... maybe a smaller wall o' text than usual? I'm trying to cut down a little. :D

The night before last, I had a dream about which I remember nothing except that it included a whole lot of Sarah Shahi and her perfect face (undoubtedly a consequence of too much Life); last night, I dreamed that I was trying to show somebody that Holmes Tik-Tok vid, except I couldn't find it without playing all this other stuff I had first. I was just about to get to it ... and then I woke up. It was weirdly frustrating. Oh, subconscious. Sometimes you vex me.

Also, randomly: in a certain sense, I think it's a good thing Burn Notice didn't start until after I got back to school - and thus lost my control of the TV. If I had been able to watch a few eps and then had the TV bent to B's whims, I might have cried a little. (At least the internet here is good; maybe I can catch up online, if USA leaves the eps up long enough.)

There was mass yesterday, which was interesting; the sermon was structured around a box metaphor where the box stood for two totally different things at different times, and the transition between the two was not especially graceful, so that was a little confusing. It was also interesting because it held certain tinges of "omg oppression!" that got my back up a little. Christianity is not exactly an oppressed or marginalized faith, although I grant that Catholicism possibly gets a little more shit in the US than it does elsewhere. I remember being incredibly pleased when Obama mentioned non-believers in his inauguration speech, because it was the first time I could remember hearing anyone include atheism in a list of religious alignments that needed to learn to work together. I don't think Christianity is under attack in the ways the sermon sometimes implied.

Still, the music was lovely; and again, I found myself enjoying the readings from the Bible more than I expected to. I just have such a thing for antiquated text, archaic word choice and phrasing - it gets me every time.

ETA, for future reference: vid post with download link.

Whew. It's been a while; I've been busy and lazy by turns, and occasionally lazy in order to put off impending busy times. :P

I'm actually pretty pleased with ( my selection of classes for this semester. ) It's a pretty good bunch to be taking the semester I'm going to be working on my thesis, I think; I should have a lot of free time to work, which is a big relief.

B, I am less pleased with, but I was kind of expecting that. :D I can't wait to get through the acclimatization week and back to the point where most of what she does doesn't bother me, but, man, it always seems to take forever. For somebody who's done so many papers on prostitution, and is always insisting that sex is what makes the world go 'round, she's not very sex-positive; she uses insults like "slut" and "whore" a lot, and it gets on my nerves with a vengeance. And she's just plain terrible at sympathizing with or understanding any perspective other than her own, which is part of a bigger problem she seems to have with understanding that generalizations mean pretty much squat as far as individual people are concerned.

But I can't let it annoy me; I just have to keep trying to change her mind in small increments, and not get angry.

... sigh.

Fortunately, I have other things to occupy me, like the transcription I really ought to be doing right now, and some short papers for various classes that I want to try to get done so that I can focus on my thesis later. So.

... it's only until May, it's only until May, it's only until May ...

Christmas was lovely, and I hope everybody had a lovely Friday, no matter what they were celebrating or not celebrating. I got books! And movies! And more books! :D I haven't actually read any of the books I was given yet; I've been too busy reading the ones I gave to other people.

The one I feel like blabbing about specifically is ( Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. Technically, spoilers within. ) It was reasonably fun to read, and there were portions that I genuinely loved, but the changes to the book's universe could have been handled much better than they were, IMO. As I was reading, I kept catching myself thinking that any one of a handful of fandom people could have done a much more awesome job with it.

As for movies, well. My family and I went to go see Avatar. I had queasy and hesitant feelings about this movie the first time I heard what it was about, and actually seeing the movie ... ( did not really alleviate those feelings. Definite spoilers, in here. ) The bottom line is that it was a very pretty movie, and that's just about the only positive thing I can say. Neytiri, Grace, and Trudy were all wonderful characters who did not get to do nearly as much as I wanted them to; and the whole thing was filled with undercurrents of racism, sexism, and ableism that really drove me crazy. Thinking about it now, it reminds me a little of 300 - if I could turn off the analytic part of my brain that is concerned with unfunny business, the part that fandom turned on and that I am extremely grateful for, it was decent enough, if still painfully unoriginal. But I can't turn that part off, and I don't really want to.

Sherlock Holmes, I liked infinitely better. My family was planning to see it Christmas Day, but those plans fell through because my sister got sick and didn't feel much like going out. So I saw it with my friends a few days later, and hopefully will be seeing it again with my family. And, my god, ( the slash. Spoilers here, too, natch. ) I reeeeeeeally hope at least a few people do some fic in this 'verse; it may not have been the best movie in the entire world, but it was reasonably solid and fun and struck me as a welcoming sort of source when it comes to fic. (Not that book canon or other adaptations haven't been - although I am pleased by a young and clever and competent Watson, some Holmes sources kind of shortchange him. Didn't hurt that he was Jude Law, either. :D)

The most significant event aside from that stuff would be that I somehow managed to blow through the rest of the terrifying HP AU, and now it's ... done. Book 1 of it, at least. Of course, I need to edit it before I can even consider putting it up anywhere; but being finished with the first draft is still a pretty awesome milestone. I'm not sure it's even really sunk in yet. Thank goodness there's a Burn Notice marathon right now, or I don't know what I would do with myself. ^^

So, I watched the newest (at least, I think it was the newest) ep of The Closer last night.

I had really mixed feelings at the outset, but I think overall more things ended up being right than wrong - I'm not sure, though, it still hasn't totally settled yet. ( My tentative perspective. Spoilery, natch. ) I was especially leery because of the whole VB-returns thing on F_W, and the attendant pronoun fail that is thankfully mostly over now; but I think the ending at least partially made up for the obnoxious parts of the beginning. I don't know, I'll have to let it percolate a little more.

In academic news, the World Lit final on Thursday went by without much of a hitch. I'm terrible at writing essays by hand, I get so tense I have to shake my hand out every few words or else I can barely write, but I think I managed okay. Then there was nothing until yesterday afternoon, which was the Cog-Neuro exam. I ... probably should have studied for that a little bit more than I did, but I think it turned out all right. This afternoon is Audiology, for which I plan to "study" by making myself a paper diagram of an audiometer and practicing in my room. Fortunately, I can do that without feeling like an idiot, because B finished her last exam and left for home yesterday afternoon. (I know this makes me a horrible person, but: \o/!)

So. Paper audiometer. Right.

Yesterday was quite a day. I left in the morning for Audiology, having lingered just long enough to watch B wake up and discover that it was snowing outside (she loves it when it snows), and when I came back, the door to our room was open and the recycling bin was out in the hall. Hmm, says I to myself, this is unusual, and so I was in some sense braced for it when I came level with our doorway and discovered that the floor was covered in water, and B was hoping desperately that I was the clean-up crew.

( The Saga of the Drains, complete with happy ending! )

Today has been much less interesting so far. Turned in my film journal and took the final quiz in Human Cultures, which means that class is officially over as far as I'm concerned, since there's no final exam. The World Lit final is tomorrow at 11:30, and then I don't have another exam until Cog-Neuro on Monday afternoon. w00t.

I have to admit, I kind of like exam week. Yes, there's studying, but if you pace it right, you end up with so much free time. And it doesn't hurt that my mom sent me a package full of candy to help me through - also doesn't hurt that B is leaving sometime next Tuesday, while I am not leaving until next Friday. ^^

Which reminds me. ( Yet more things B has done lately that annoy me. ) She put her scarf on again this morning, and asked me whether she looked more Soviet or more Muslim; I told her that all she looked like to me was a person with a scarf over their hair, just like anybody else would if they had a scarf over their hair, but I don't think she got the point. If only I were more articulate.

Anyway, I should stop griping and start studying for World Lit. \o/

First, a meme! From various places, I forget whose journal I saw it on first.

1. Write down the names of 10 characters.

2. Write a fic of fifteen words or fewer for every prompt, using the characters determined by the numbers. Do NOT read the prompts before you do step 1.

1. Harry Dresden (Dresden Files)
2. Morgana (Merlin)
3. Gwen (Merlin)
4. Karrin Murphy (Dresden Files)
5. Hellboy (Hellboy [movie])
6. Arthur (Merlin)
7. Susan Rodriguez (Dresden Files)
8. Merlin (Merlin)
9. Liz Sherman (Hellboy [movie])
10. John Myers (Hellboy [movie])

I ... failed utterly at sticking to the letter of this meme; apparently I'm almost incapable of expressing myself in exactly/under fifteen words. But I kept them all to under twenty-five words, at least. >.> <.< That totally counts. Also, the lack of variety in fandoms is a little pathetic. /o\ I am so bad at branching out.

( Eleven indubitably lame ficlets! )

Kind of figures my first genuine postage of fic would be a bunch of teeny chunks that'll never go anywhere. Although I am actually almost tempted to keep going with a couple of those - never mind the eighty billion things I ought to finish first. Curse you, finals week. I shake my fist in your general direction.

In the unfunny business end of things, I almost cried in Human Cultures today, out of sheer frustration-by-proxy. We finished up the second half of the final part of A Kalahari Family, the documentary by John Marshall, and jesus. Every single time there was a clip of yet another white "expert" talking about how the !Kung were so ~close to nature~, I wanted to punch somebody in the face, because it was so transparently an excuse to keep on failing to actually do anything helpful - like, say, get supplies to fix the pumps needed to keep the !Kung farms running. (Which, I might add, were only broken in the first place by elephants, who, according to Marshall, are not native to the area; they were brought in to give tourists something ~African~ to goggle at.) It was disgusting.

I will say it made me really glad I decided to start using Kiva: I'm not completely useless! Mostly useless, sure, but not completely! \o/

My to-do list at the moment mostly consists of my Human Cultures film journal, which is due next Wednesday, and starting to study for both the last Human Cultures quiz (also Wednesday) and my World Lit final (Thursday, aka the first day of final exams). No matter how many semesters I do this, I'm always so blindsided by finals. The end of the semester seemed so far away before Thanksgiving!

Since I just saw New Moon for the second time, and then finally gave in to curiosity and watched 300 on TNT, I guess I might as well record all the teal deer that came to me while I was watching.

( New Moon! Ah, lolariousness. )

It was fun to watch purely for the lulz, but if I start thinking about the meta, it makes me itch to rewrite the books - not as fic, just for myself, so I could read something silly and fluffy that wouldn't annoy me if I thought about it too hard. The Twilight franchise is a bunch of brain-twinkies, sure; but some twinkies are crappier than others.

The highlight of the movie was definitely seeing the Sherlock Holmes preview that showed beforehand. I seriously faint with joy every time I see ads for that movie, and I am going to see it the day it comes out, and then possibly a couple more times.

( And 300 - more abs, more racism, but also slightly more plot! )

Overall, the "it's a subjective account from a Spartan!" line of reasoning will only excuse so much. I mean, there's plenty of media about Thermopylae from the Spartan point of view; did you really need to make more? And one that so dedicatedly turned the Persians into one-note, literally monstrous villains? Really? And it was a particular shame that Queen Gorgo was the only woman with basically any role at all. I was under the impression that Spartan women actually had a modicum of rights and privileges, and a revamp of the stand at Thermopylae would have been a pretty good opportunity to do something cool with that - instead of tying the extraordinariness of Spartan women to their ability to bear manly sons, which, of course, is what they did. Sigh.

... So, weirdly, I have practically the same complaints about both movies; to me, they actually kind of fall into the same category. New Moon was emotional porn; 300 was bravery porn. They both had the same kind of single-minded focus plus implications regarding race and gender that ranged from vaguely to seriously uncomfortable, and for me, that equals ... something I might watch if it happened to be on, so that I could yell at the TV, and not much else.

So, it's been two weeks since last time, and man, what a two weeks it's been.

For starters, B did something incredibly stupid, which she has done at least three times before and which has never failed to make a mess of her personal life, yet which she has also apparently somehow not learned to stop doing. I, of course, was the happy receptacle for her problem-wrangling, which is something she tends to do aloud whenever possible; I feel like maybe I should become a diplomat or something, because living with her has taught me SO WELL to not let on when I feel like people are being morons/jackasses/pick your poison. RRGH.

The angst over that is actually still going on, a little - it was much diminished by the news that B's long-distance boyfriend will be coming to the States for Christmas to see her, though, which was a relief for me.

My computer is still mostly kaput. Because I'm running Knoppix from a CD, it can't retain anything - whenever I turn my computer off, and then turn it on again, no files I saved when it was on the first time will still be there. I knew this going in, so there was no catastrophic loss or anything, but since my computer no longer believes it has a battery, every time I knock the cord out, it's like starting from a blank slate. Not hugely troubling, just annoying.

However, those two things put aside, being on vacation is great. I know it was wrong of me to skip classes on Monday and Tuesday in order to give myself a week instead of three days, but. TOTALLY WORTH IT. I got to hang out with my sister at the treehouse (her apartment), and mainline three or four episodes of NCIS:LA, whose smarmy glory is truly blinding. :D I also ordered myself the second season of Burn Notice; I'm trying to get Br and AT properly addicted to it, and we're almost through the first season, so. Obviously I can't get it from the post office today, but it should have arrived by now, which means there is a pleasant moment of actually getting hold of it that is waiting for me somewhere in the future. \o/

And, of course, today is Thanksgiving, which probably means I shouldn't have started this post out with a bunch of complaining. ^^ And I am thankful, for all kinds of things; for every part of my life that has led me to end up where I am, even the ones that seemed unpleasant at the time, because, despite my woes, I'm in a pretty darn good place; and, of course, for my friends and family, for past friends who have drifted away and future friends I haven't met yet, for fandom, for ... everything. For life, for the world, for the inestimable beauty and wonder intrinsic to the universe.

That turned peculiarly existential. ^^ Anyway. I shall create a new tag for entries where I gripe about B, purely for purposes of statistics, and then I shall watch The Closer and help my mother cook and have a marvelous day, and I hope everyone else has a marvelous day, too.

Awesomely enough, my computer picked this weekend to have some kind of enormous flailing shitfit and commit ritual suicide. Or something like that. I spent yesterday trying to handle the internet withdrawal, with moderate amounts of success, and today managed to learn enough about burning CDs and ISO files from my sister to get Knoppix working, so that I wouldn't have to keep borrowing B's computer (which I did this morning for the sake of the aforementioned learning).

At first, I was definitely freaking out, but now that I have some semblance of functionality again, if not access to any of my files (either there's something really wrong with my hard drive, or the crash kept Windows from marking the hard drive as no longer in use, because I can't mount it from Knoppix), I feel quite a bit calmer. If it does turn out to be a complete catastrophic meltdown, I'll definitely rue the loss of fics in progress, pictures, and stuff like that - but on the other hand, a lot of my writing is backed up on Google Docs, and everything else I can probably do without. The biggest thing would be the loss of absolutely all of my thesis data; objectively sucky, yes, but ... to be honest, I never really wanted to do a thesis in the first place. I mean, given that I'm supposed to do one because I'm in the Honors College, I'm very happy with the topic and all, but if I had had a choice, I'd never have done it; I'm not at all married to the idea of graduating with College Honors, which is what the thesis will (if successfully defended) earn me.

... Now I'm going to get myself half-hoping everything got trashed, and then if it turns out to be recoverable, I'm going to be all bummed. Oh, brain.

Looks like it's storydump time once again; my classes have picked up ever so slightly, possibly because the professors can all sense Thanksgiving inching closer, and combined with all the proofing of other people's papers I've somehow ended up doing (AT asks me to check over her Spanish papers! I don't even know Spanish!), some of my copious free time has started slipping out of my grasp.

Which is ironic, considering that I was bored in September, and now NaNo is coming up. Oh, life.

Anyway. In the category of Offensive Things B Has Said/Done, there are a couple new gems, including ( rape is funny! This movie might have a rape scene in it, but it's a comedy! ) Needless to say, I was not at all amused.

B laughed.

As has recently become my SOP, I let her know what I thought, although not with the kind of language or at the kind of volume I might have liked. Br came down very firmly on my side later, which was a relief, but B still insists the movie was funny, which kind of makes me want to cry.

The other one was the somewhat less distressing ( he sounds gay! ) I did not know it was possible to be "too PC" for Vermont, of all states.

The interesting thing is that I wasn't being PC. Perhaps this is just me, but that term tends to connote more calculation than anything else, when I hear it - you are being PC if you are careful or are telling other people to be careful what you/they say because you are worried that a member of some kind of minority will one day overhear and be offended by it. And I'm pretty sure that used to be what I was doing, at least in some cases. But somewhere in the last few years, I've managed to grow a brain, and now it's more about stopping things because they are actively offending me, not because they have the potential to offend somebody else. I mean, I still want to make sure that I speak up when I see something that might bother somebody who isn't me, because it's better than nothing even if it speaks to an enormous lack of empathy on my part, but most of the time, now, I am offended. That attitude toward rape bothers me immensely; and, yes, partly it bothers me kind of on behalf of anyone who has ever been sexually assaulted, but mostly it just bothers me, even though I am not a member of that group (... yet, I suppose I should say, considering the odds). That attitude toward gay men, likewise, bothers me, even though the odds are very long that I will ever be a gay man, and I am terribly lacking in gay male friends.

... And now I need to stop talking about this, because I'm getting progressively less able to communicate my point, and also if I don't stop I am going to be hugely grouchy and sharp with B when she comes back.

On the more amusing end of the spectrum of stupid I've encountered recently, there was a boy in my World Literature class who ended up taking control of the class discussion, and moved it kind of abruptly away from the Aeneid and toward the value of war. ... In a sense where he said, "I'm okay with America becoming a violent empire that takes over the world if it means I'm going to be wealthy and happy," almost verbatim. He quoted Sean Hannity on the matter of America being the greatest nation God ever put on the earth, unironically. He actually told the class that it was a good thing the French, the English, and the Germans had been such good "warriors" (yes, that is the word he used), because otherwise America wouldn't be here - they wouldn't have been able to clear out all those Amerindians who were in their way, after all.

It pretty much went like this:

CRAZY BOY: **talks a boatload of ridiculousness**
REST OF THE CLASS: ... there is not enough D: in the WORLD.
ONE AWESOME KID IN THE CORNER WHOM I NOW ♥: Well, he did quote Sean Hannity. I mean, what were we expecting, after that?

Basically, the AKitC (Awesome Kid in the Corner) saved the whole incident from being something that it would make me sad inside to remember, and turned it into a reasonably amusing anecdote to tell people. ♥, AKitC. ♥.

I'm still going to mass on Sunday afternoons - I really, really enjoy the singing, although I'm still a little nervous that somebody's going to get weird about me being in the choir, and it's interesting to listen to the sermons. Sometimes I almost feel like the sermon ruins the day's reading, because the passages from the Bible are so eloquent they pretty much speak for themselves. And there is always the occasional awkward moment - last Sunday, for example, the reading was from the end of Mark 10, the passage about the blind man named Bartimaeus asking to be healed. The ... priest? I am still not sure about my terminology - went a little overboard in imagining the awfulness of being blind; I was with him on it being something of a shame to never see the faces of your parents, but the look of love in somebody's eyes strikes me as kind of take-it-or-leave-it (wouldn't the sound of love in somebody's voice, or the feel of love in somebody's touch, be pretty amazing?), and he totally lost me on the blind missing out on the "fullness of being a human person" [sic]. I was expecting him to go on to something like never seeing the colors of a sunset, not, you know, somehow not being a complete person. o.O

Also, I still have trouble not laughing when the bells ring during the transubstantiation (and why do I know that word and not what the guy who talks is called?); I know this is awful of me, but it seriously does sound like the background sound effect for a moment of truly terrible SFX from an old episode of The Twilight Zone, or something.

The HP AU is ever so slowly inching its way toward completion. I'm trying to get a decent chunk of it done before NaNo starts, but it is dawning on some part of my subconscious that when I finish it - well, when I finish it I'm going to edit it, natch, until it is less awful, but at some point after that, I'm going to ... post it. Probably on the Pit, first, although I'd like to have it here, too, just for the sake of having all my fannishness in one place (with tags!). Other people (besides M and my sister) will be able to see it. /o\ I ... I don't know about this whole "writing" thing.

And, of course, it doesn't help that NaNo is starting to take over my brain. The odds are on a sequel to last year: this time, instead of thwarting the massive evil plot of a clockwork company in AU!Britain, my dwarf airship pirate captain and her trusty crew will most likely be fighting demons in AU!India. And possibly borrowing a goddess's hammer to do a little smashing; we'll see.

Aaaaaaaand now that I'm done with this giant wall of text, I should go get dinner. \o/

Hey, look, it's another really long annoying post. \o/

First, ( two weird/mildly interesting dreams. ) I know I'm probably getting excessive about recording these things, but some of them are really interesting, and I'm hoping I'll get better at remembering them as time goes on.

In Human Cultures last week, we watched a video about the gold rush and consequent white settlement of Papua New Guinea, about which I have ( a few thinky thoughts. ) Mostly, I ended up wondering what would have happened if the Papua New Guineans had had the chance to control their own natural resources, instead of having them essentially stolen.

I also have new gripes about B to record. For reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, she came to Chicago on the trail of her father's killers rented both Princess Mononoke and Life Is Beautiful. Life Is Beautiful, she rented without knowing it was a movie about the Holocaust; along the way, there is a point at which it becomes obvious beyond a shadow of a doubt that the main character's family is Jewish. B responded to this revelation with the following utterly boggling statement: "But [the main character] doesn't look Jewish."

Fortunately for my own self-respect, my mouth did not manage to get in the way of my brain this time; I said something rather acidic about how, yes, right, of course, because you could definitely tell whether people were Jewish just by looking at them. Fortunately for our continuing friendly relations, she immediately turned sheepish, and apologized.

(... For the record, B does not spend every second of every day saying offensive things; just the other day, she paid for a complete stranger's lunch because he forgot his student ID card. I have to start noting the times she makes me glad I know her, too, just so that I don't end up with a ton of bitter entries and nothing nice to balance it out. :D)

And, finally, I spent this last weekend at home. We don't get today off, but Friday was our fall recess, and today I only have - well, would have had - one class, so I skipped and spent an extra day at home. The guineas are truly enormous now; they haven't lost all of their baby feathers yet, so if you had to, you could probably tell Clary, DG, and Evey apart, but it's tough. They have also developed the adorable habit of following anyone that comes within a fifteen-foot radius, including people, the dogs, and the car. They don't like to be without the sound of human voices, so we've put a clock-radio out in the barn, and we turn it on for them to listen to.

My sister got my mother a board game - The Settlers of Catan - for her birthday; we played it about four times this weekend, and came up with at least a page of alternate rules. The most significant alteration was probably ( our set of changes to the Robber. ) Probably worrying about the meta implications of a board game makes us both complete freaks, but. I like the Reaper a lot better than the Robber. I'd worry about having erased the natives of Catan, except I don't think the game's creators intended for anybody to think of the Robber as such, or, indeed, for anybody to worry about whether Catan had a native population in the first place. Which is kind of fail in its own way, I guess.

I am managing to mostly keep up with SPN through reaction posts; I really, really don't want to spend time and energy watching the show until I know how S5 is going to end. Which I know is wimpy, and possibly even kind of wanky/entitled, but I need to be happy, okay. Unless the ending is in the general vicinity of what I want to have happen, I don't want to get myself super invested, because then I will cry like a baby. A hungry, angry baby. And be sad.

The same kind of goes for Merlin, except without the worry - that's just because I don't have access to the show at the moment.

I spent pretty much the entire trip back on the bus making hypothetical mental vids to the songs that came up on my playlist. Peculiarly enough, the fandom that comes most readily to my mind when I hear Stroke 9's Do It Again is due South, solely because of the "you're a freak" part; every time I hear that, there's, like, a ghost "... understood" that follows it in my brain, and I spend the rest of the song picturing RayK and Fraser.

... Someday, I should actually watch that show.

Also, I did not throw up on the bus, or pass out. \o/

It was B's 21st birthday yesterday, so, naturally, she went out and got drunk.

I don't drink, for a number of different reasons: the biggest one is that I just plain hate the taste of alcohol, but I also actually find the entire idea of drunkenness a little creepy, like, you are deliberately putting yourself into a state where you no longer make the same decisions you would normally make - you are, at least to some extent, a different person. It weirds me out, idk. Plus it doesn't really seem like it's worth it: B tends to characterize it to me as something to do for fun, but A) I have always managed to have fun enough to make me happy without alcohol (M, K, Ka, J, and Q also do not drink, generally speaking), B) it seems to only actually be fun as long as you're drunk, given the number of times B has bemoaned all the drunk-dials she made/stupid things she did, and C) the amount of pain and vomit that follows seems like quite a bit more unpleasantness than any power of alcohol to enhance fun can outweigh.

(NB: All of this applies much more to binge drinking, college-party-type drinking, than going out with friends for a few drinks on a Friday or having a cold beer on a hot afternoon. I'm not, like, morally opposed to the consumption of alcohol in general, or anything like that.)

Anyway, the point is: I feel like a terrible person, but I'm kind of evilly enjoying watching her suffer through her hangover. (I know, worst friend ever. /o\)

I also kind of enjoyed that she was gone last night, because it meant I had control of the TV; I watched a couple episodes of SVU, and then an episode of HawthoRNe that I think I must have missed the first time around. I've come to really love HawthoRNe: I love the predominance of relationships between women, and between characters of color (and, pleasingly often, both at once!); I think I may be developing a girlcrush on Jada Pinkett Smith - and Suleka Mathew, for that matter; and I'm pleased deep in my nerdy soul to be seeing Colonel McQueen from Space: Above & Beyond again. 24 can be fun to watch sometimes, but there are so many things about it that annoy me if I let them; it's nice to have him be on something else. I haven't gotten to watch as many episodes as I'd like to, but I've very much enjoyed all of the ones that I've seen, so.

Also: ( an awkward conversation with Br. ) Obviously, it's okay to dislike a ship, to not like slash very much or not like het very much or whatever it is - it's personal taste, it can't really be categorized as wrong, as incorrect. I think what bothers me about Br's gripe is that the way she phrased it moves the issue into, or at least toward, the realm of moral judgment, with her on the side of people who are capable of appreciating the beauty of strong, platonic male friendship, and people who ship things like Frodo/Sam on the side of the poor, lust-driven plebes who can't leave well enough alone and get all carried away with that wacky subtext crap.

Phew. Now that I've got that off my chest: shower time!

Somehow I have come to be in the Catholic Center choir. o.O

It's not even actually all that hugely convoluted a story; AT is Catholic, and I asked her if I might go to mass with her at some point, in pursuit of a ritual to write about for Human Cultures. She said yes, and added that I should come with her to choir, because they need people and I sing (not especially well, but reasonably on tune - and, bonus, audibly, as long as I am surrounded by other people who are also singing). So ... I did.

( I was a little nervous about it, for several reasons ... )

The mass was really interesting to watch. I've only really been to two kinds of services: Unitarian Universalist, with my dad, which I mostly went to for the brownies that came after the actual service was over, and which was ... pretty much nothing like a Roman Catholic mass, and Quaker, which was even less like a mass. A Quaker meeting is, like, an anti-mass, as far as level of organization and ritual goes. And one of the most interesting parts was how much of it my mother remembered as I was telling her about it on the phone today (it's her birthday, so I made sure to call). She went to Catholic school when she was younger, but has kind of lapsed since.

In conclusion: I think I'm going to stick with it. I hadn't realized how much I missed singing in a group, learning new music and practicing it and being taught to sing it well. \o/

Not only do I love this school, I love my hall, and the Honors College in general; it's not perfect, but they make such an effort to expand our horizons. Example A being this afternoon, when we had Marta Gómez sitting in the living room on the ground floor, singing, for a full hour, before she went to her actual concert this evening. Beautiful stuff; I am very, very fond of her voice, and the songs were all gorgeous. She made a particular point of mentioning that she writes and sings her songs in the style that she does because she thinks it's important to perpetuate the unique musical traditions of South America, instead of writing more Euro-American-style rock or pop. (Not that she was disdainful of Euro-American music; I'm just not describing what she said accurately.)

Bottom line: it was AWESOME. ♥♥♥♥♥!

Outside of the Davis Center on the UVM campus, there are three flagpoles. The first flagpole always has the American flag; the second flagpole always has the Vermont flag. But the third flagpole changes all the time: on Earth Day (and also just randomly) there is a flag with a picture of the earth on it; around Diwali, they put up the Indian national flag; near Chinese New Year, it's a Chinese flag. Today, it was the rainbow flag, which gets put up for national events (like Coming Out Week, for example) and for smaller, UVM-only things - this time, it's an all-day multiple-speaker event, "Faithful Narratives", which I'm fairly certain was organized by UVM's LGBTQA Services office.

Sometimes, I really, really love this school.

Ahem. Anyway: Babel passage! \o/ It is going to be so nice to have a place like this to store this stuff, especially one that's so taggable. Sometimes I drift off into daydreams where my music is taggable, and I can listen to it by picking whichever tag I feel like hearing, instead of having to construct different playlists for everything. trufax.

( Babel passage. Not important to anybody but me! )

( Cut for grammatical and phonetic chatter, also not important to anybody but me. )

And so on. Glossing is so much fun, but, man, what an enormous time sink. ^^ I always forget just how much of one it is until I'm doing it.

So, a check mark for that. I think I'll hold off on Psalm 23 until I've finished the other one, too. Now I just need to shower and get some writing done, and today will actually have been good for something. :D

(I feel so sad tagging this as Conlang A. I really need to give this a proper, in-language name.)

It's kind of astonishing, and perhaps a little pathetic, just how much the music I'm listening to affects my mood. A couple rounds of "Down to Earth" the other day, and I got so chest-squeezy I may have actually mildly strained a muscle in my back. ^^ I also fell down on the stairs today, which was very special; I expect to have two rather impressive bruises on my knees tomorrow.

I'm also a little alarmed by the frequency with which I'm finding myself composing posts in my head when things happen to me. o.O

B and her boyfriend have had their first true argument, by which I mean there was crying and yelling involved, albeit over Skype. I managed to escape upstairs, and helped AT with her Spanish homework, despite the fact that pretty much everything I know about Spanish, I learned from French. After that, I got to sit by and read Br's book on Proto-Indo-European, which I heart like mad. Linguistics is the discipline of my heart.

Which reminds me: having gotten my Lit books, and having a moment to spare, I want to put up a couple of the Egyptian poems, mostly for my own future reference, because they are awesome.

( My love is one and only, without peer ... )

My favorite bits of that one are mostly pieces of phrases - "bright in the forehead of a lucky year", "blueshadowed sidefall of hair", "heart would run captive to such slim arms". And, of course, the delightful euphemism of "god's plenty below". :D

( I was simply off to see Nefrus my friend ... )

This is one of the funny ones, although it also has a couple phrases I find particularly touching (particularly the "oh, look at you, feet" part). I find myself liking how the speaker reminds herself to be realistic in the last stanza, but can't stop herself from one last, wistful oh, Mehy.

And a shorter funny one - ( I think I'll go home and lie very still ... )

The last line actually made me laugh out loud a little, the first time I read it. ^^

And the last one: ( Love of you is mixed deep in my vitals ... )

I like the second half of this one better than the first; the last few images stuck with me the best (particularly "the hearth of familiar arms").

All of this, plus the PIE stuff, reminds me that I am, at long last, very nearly finished with the Babel passage, and, as a bonus, Psalms 23 and 137. However, I need to run through them one more time to make a few last corrections to the grammar. I also have been struck by a new conlang bug - this time, I'm thinking something with cases, and maybe combinations of glottal stops and syllabic ms and ns (possibly even ls and rs, although I do want to be sure I can pronounce the end product). I kind of half-finished a conlang that used a relatively simple sort of click, once, and I'd like to try that again, too. I need to expand my phonetic horizons!

Ahem. So, barring any totally unforeseen grammatical snarls, I vow to myself to post the darned thing tomorrow. That, plus another chapter of HP AU and a few more cliché-bingo-fic wanderings - and some homework, of course - and I may actually feel like I've managed to accomplish something this week. \o/

This is probably going to end up a huge, unwieldy monster of a post, but, again, I have accumulated absolute oodles of things to say.

So.

( I went home this past weekend. )

The guineas are enormous - they've got to be at least five or six times as big as they were when they were newly-hatched and fluffed out, and their feathers have come out very fast. Fortunately, their heads haven't changed much, so you can still tell Clary, DG, and Evey apart by looking at the sides of their faces; but I expect that won't last too much longer. Maybe we should write the first letters of their names on their legs with a Sharpie, or something.

While I was at home, I resumed my usual pose of sloth on the couch, which was how I came to end up watching ( Blade: Trinity. ) And it was very weird to see Ray Kowalski CKR as a bad guy yet again - I don't even know why that weirds me out so much, it's not like I've actually watched due South, and yet a combination of people's icons and Googling have imprinted him on me as RayK. Oh, and John Doe as Dracula was just ... wow. That was very strange. (Not that he didn't do a good job, or anything, but John Doe was so ... well, okay, mild-mannered is the wrong word, considering some of the stuff he did on the show, but.)

When I came back to UVM on Sunday night, B wasn't in the room, so I went upstairs, to visit my suitemates from last year - let's say Br and AT, if I haven't already called them something else. Anyway, they were watching ( Penelope, which I have already seen once before. ) And, lastly, thank you so very much, every bandom fic that has ever made any mention of the potential resemblance between Gerard Way in drag and Christina Ricci; it was like an optical illusion, my brain kept flipping back and forth between what was actually happening in the movie and "omg if I squint like this I can pretend Gerard Way and James MacAvoy are gazing soulfully at each other!!!1!"

I'd natter some more about my classes, but there's not a lot to say. I am still mildly underwhelmed by Audiology; as always, I love the professor, but she spent at least half an hour explaining something that seemed ... only the slightest bit tricky, if even tricky at all, to me. :P I did finally get my books for World Lit; the Egyptian poetry is just as awesome as I remember, and I want to dust off that one conlang and try translating a few; hopefully, I'll get around to that during all my free time tomorrow. And Cog-Neuro is still simultaneously dizzying and boring, a combination which is not exactly improved by the stultifying heat in that classroom. Blegh.

I did finally manage to force out the seventeenth chapter of the HP AU, which is good, because that was really tripping me up; the beginning of the eighteenth has come much more easily, which hopefully means I won't get quite as stuck on it. And all my free time so far has been incredibly good for my cliché-fic - I now have a bewildering one hundred and eighty-one (181!) snippets, of varying length and equally varying odds of ever being finished, over ... four fandoms (well, four fandoms if you don't count the ones the crossovers cross over with, at least). I am simultaneously impressed and unimpressed with myself.

Having yesterday off is screwing me up so badly; I kept thinking today was Monday, and then somehow it had switched to today being Wednesday by midmorning.

Still, I managed to keep my brain from making me miss any classes. Audiology was another stunningly dull review, this time about the anatomy of the ear, which I remember pretty clearly from Speech and Hearing - it wasn't the professor's fault it was dull, she was awesome as always. I have to remember to get my HIPAA training done again; no way am I going to find the certification form from last year, so I might as well do it again.

World Lit was the second half of Gilgamesh, and then a bunch of Egyptian love poetry; the poetry was a mix of dirty, funny, and beautiful that really worked for me. Unfortunately, I don't have my book for that class yet - although it should be on its way soon - so I can't repost any for future reference for a while. Sadface! On the plus side, the discussion was mildly interesting, and I had the presence of mind to write down a whole bunch of the cliché bingo prompts I still haven't written snippets for in my notebook, so I got a fair amount of brainstorming done, if not a huge amount of actual writing. \o/

Cog-Neuro wasn't bad in an objective sense, but there's something about the hour-and-fifteen minute classes that gets to me; I usually lose the majority of my powers of concentration at about the hour mark, and spend the last fifteen minutes fidgeting and counting down the seconds under my breath. ... That's probably a habit I should break.

I bought a new ID card. It has become a ritual for me to lose my student ID at least once a year; this year, I started early. Rather than waiting for it to find its way back to me, as it has with kind of bewildering regularity in the past, I decided to go ahead and shell out the $15 for a new one - the magnetic strip on the old one was starting to wear and need more than one swipe to work, so it was probably time. It's very weird, having a new one. ( I'm not even a tiny bit photogenic ... ) Whatever, I am so overthinking this. It's just an ID card, self! :D

Anyway. We have a coloring book for Cog-Neuro, along with a normal textbook; we had a whole handful of assignments in it, and I spent most of this afternoon on them, after buying myself some colored pencils at the bookstore. It felt weirdly adult, to have a need for something, and go, without asking anybody or telling anybody or anything, to buy it for myself. Which is, again, making a bigger deal than necessary out of something relentlessly ordinary, but that seems to be the order of the day, here.

( B is still driving me crazy ... ) But other than that, it's all been much more tolerable.

Aaaaand now it's basically 11:30, and I have Human Cultures at 8:30 tomorrow, so.

So, M, J, K, Ka, and Q came up for a visit; we ended up spending it finishing the first season of Burn Notice, which we'd been watching together at the end of the summer.

One of the eps we watched was False Flag, and I was ( surprised by their reaction to Evelyn. Spoilers (?) for Burn Notice 1.10. ) So. That was an interesting time.

The rest of the visit was a lot of fun, though, and I was sorry when they had to leave. Hopefully I'll get to see them all during winter vacation, though.

I'm still fighting my way through the HP AU; I keep letting myself get distracted by things that are not even anywhere near relevant yet, which is not helping. Hopefully I can finish another few chapters this weekend, though, since I won't have much else to do. And I want to do a couple more cliché-bingo-based snippets. Those are almost embarrassingly fun.