. . . . . entries for 31.1.10 . . . . .
Oh, this semester is not going to be very fun, I fear. I fear it will in fact be very, very nervewracking. It has certainly gotten off to a great start that way.
Here is to being open and direct in all things! Except bitching on one's blog. o.O That isn't really called for.
. . . . . entries for 29.1.10 . . . . .
I wrote this some time ago, and it's been hanging around, melancholy and heavy, in my iChat status menu. I don't feel the way I felt then, but nevertheless, the pain of that is in this.
"and not just once: she required that she touch His wound over and over, and the rest of Him also, to assure herself that He was there and the Lord who would forgive anything. while He allowed her this, and even gave her leave to weep into His side, even He could not forgive her."
Even unconditional love must, for its facets, have conditions. How it hurts to stumble upon them - and it hurts because the pain is deserved.
This blog seems to have gotten overemotional since it started up again. :P
I wish there were a way to avoid the slow, sad "back to reality" feeling experienced after a sojourn into a masterfully crafted other world. I definitely felt it after rereading Diamond Age, and now again after seeing Avatar.
When I try to think of a "take back into reality" message for Avatar, I come up with a bitter realization almost wholly unrelated to the movie itself: things aren't that simple. Would that they were.
Come to think of it, the extent to which the movie messes with dream/reality and leads you along with Jake as he "falls in love with" the planet and the race is pretty gross, painful meta for those who get their heartstrings tangled up in their fiction and find it hard to break free again. Effective, but thoroughly cruel.
. . . . . entries for 28.1.10 . . . . .
The desolation of the cold wind over the river tonight, the grays and grays of the view, is not the sort of thing one writes similes to describe, I realized as I tried to figure out what the simile would be. It is a desolation to which other, lesser desolations must be likened by simile.
But it galled me the most to be told "go east" - to be yelled at, shouted at, AGAIN, "go east" -
I guess, by now, I shouldn't expect anything but the way tonight was - if anything, less.
when west is home, not east, not east. West there is something to find,
In any case, happy birthday, dad. :) and east there are only things I know too well and can't change.
I wish I knew what's going awry with me lately - strange lightheadedness, weakness, and so on that seems to happen more often at home. Am I allergic to home? o.O
. . . . . entries for 27.1.10 . . . . .
My dad - himself a Republican - just suggested something awesome to me: "Republycan."
I'm watching the State of the Union - a couple minutes delayed, now, for a coffee break in the Sherman house. My facebook status is full of snarky, minor comments on it; maybe I'll blog some sort of impression. I don't know. You don't read this blog for political humbuggery anyway, do you? :P
We have a new family member hanging around here. My mom has just named him Delano. Cassie decided that he sounds like a male great horned owl over Christmas. I like him a lot.
. . . . . entries for 26.1.10 . . . . .
Joyce Carol Oates's stories are full of questionable, apparently un-self-conscious punctuation errors or moments of disregard, including thoughts spliced into exposition and dialogue sometimes stuck in without quotes, mostly with. Those are the obvious stylistic quirks, for they are grammatical and pop out. She is also a careful chooser of voice, a careful writer of dialects when it suits her to be. Her stories are about the characters, not the plot or the setting. Her characters are real but end up doing absurd things, in their reality.
I am pretty excited to be a student of hers but not sure how she will deal with the angle I plan to take, i.e. a not-too-distant future setting, as focused on that setting's details as on the people in it, because the people are only examples - I want the reader, too, to live in that place when they read.
There is certainly a gimmick for that, but is there a non-gimmicky way to still make it an overt and visible part of my purpose?
What are your favorite stories, and why?
[mine: Snow Crash, Diamond Age, Middlesex, other beautiful complex other-yet-this-worldly things involving faith and body-souls and love
I am so terribly sappy for an agnostic
(or is that normal, for a not-apathetic agnostic?)]
Do you ever say things like "I believe in you" or "I believe in us"? I do, though I gather such things are considered trite amongst many people of my age and of similar intellectual inclination to myself. Whether or not you find it trite (or ridiculous or dated or whatever-have-you), you should know that I mean something when I say it. I am not just saying "I believe in you" to fill space, or even just to provide moral support, although assuredly I am trying to do that.
Really. I do believe in you. I may even believe in us.
. . . . . entries for 23.1.10 . . . . .
Grades so far: passed CWR, A in abnormal (lolerskates), B in neuro. I had a B+ on the midterm, so I must have done pretty un-excellently on the final. Hrglbrgl.
I am in Rochester and a little unwell, I think - tummy bothering me. Might be adjusting to the tap water here or something. Nothing major. Frank has a swim meet today. I should probably, you know, get ready to go. :P
. . . . . entries for 21.1.10 . . . . .
Holy cow - it's waking up now, but my foot was just amazingly, weirdly asleep. o.O Sorry. Had to share, evidently.
I'm home. Off to Rochester tomorrow. (:
I took my last final and thereby finished my semester - pretty good, all told - and am now sitting a few strides from my spring advisor's office, waiting for it to be reasonably close to noon so I can go bug him about what the heck he is advising, anyway.
I felt pretty spacey and sleepy during my final - not to the point of impairing my knowledge, but certainly to the point of causing me to blur lines between concepts and therefore ramble on a bit in the short answers - so I decided I required caffeine. Caffeine seemed a poor idea on my mostly empty stomach, so I also decided I required noms of the breakfastlike variety. This led me on an epic journey from Fruity Yogurt (closed, alas - I wanted to try hot bubble tea) to Panera (which stops serving breakfast at 10:30 - it was 10:45) to Starbucks, where I purchased the appropriate caffeine and noms and sat down to brainstorm for this meeting. Sessions of that nature tend to make me feel more competent, this one being no exception, and Jeff Buckley's version of Lilac Wine started playing (in the open air, through Starbucks speakers where everyone could hear it!) somewhere in the middle. It was nice.
. . . . . entries for 20.1.10 . . . . .
Fun principle from social psychology: if you're trying to guess how you'd feel or what you'd do in a certain situation - say, if you break up with your boyfriend, or if you go to college far away from home, or whatever - don't bother. You probably can't accurately guess your emotions or behavior in a situation you've never experienced before.
Overthinking is also bad practice. When your gut feeling is strong, go with it.
On the one hand, I am going to have a stupidly busy semester this Spring: five classes, a JP, research-assistantry, possibly trying to fire up a student organization, figuring out what I'm doing this summer (but, arrrrgh, that has to really get going over intersession). On the other hand, two of my five classes are p/d/f by default, so I shouldn't really be bitching, but on a third hand, I care a lot about those classes intrinsically, one of them being enviro-theater and the other writing with Oates, so . . . hrglbrgl.
I get a huge kick out of the fact that, before scholarly works are published these days, they very often hang out in Word documents for months on end, in various phases of revision. I have a couple of unpublished papers from the behavioral sciences that a prof sent me to help with my JP, and it is quite something to be able to fiddle with them as though I had written them myself - although, granted, all I do with them is highlight and maybe comment.
Oi vey, second semester JP. I hope you are a viable thing. I mean, the idea is to learn about and plan what I'm doing senior year, so . . . isn't that inherently viable? I hope?
. . . . . entries for 19.1.10 . . . . .
I am somewhat irked about my grade on my abnormal paper. Oh well.
. . . . . entries for 18.1.10 . . . . .
I wish it were less fun to draw mythological beasties and more fun to draw real people. :P
. . . . . entries for 16.1.10 . . . . .
Arrrgghh new dragons argggghghhhhhhhh
. . . . . entries for 12.1.10 . . . . .
Oh, that gosh-darned "what now?" feeling.
Dear hormones: "this is not a game of who the fuck are you." (Not actually the message I had intended, but certainly utilizes a compelling tone for this situation. The message I had intended was more like "this is not your freaking day, this is my freaking day." I bet Eddie could deliver that one similarly awesomely.)
. . . . . entries for 11.1.10 . . . . .
Addendum: I just tried to hack URLs for a lot of the other ff-fan test results, and I think a ton of playable characters have been totally deleted, which is THE SADS.
Holy cow, guys, I'm not Laguna anymore.
. . . but actually, just changing my answer for favorite FF game to "I don't really know" switches me back to Laguna.
I'm pretty happy being an Ashe-Laguna hybrid.
. . . . . entries for 9.1.10 . . . . .
Hello, o neglected blog of mine. It is reading period, so I don't really have long to stay and chat, especially since I felt rather unusually ill earlier in the day and was lying down and wishing my tummy would stop hurting for quite some time. But I thought I would grumble here, a little about how much I have to do (don't I always grumble about that?) and also about myself. I wish I saw connections less easily sometimes. It would make me less inclined to worry, which, granted, is bad on some levels - some global, important levels - but would be good for looking at pictures, for believing less hard-fact stuff and more that requires leaps. For believing in people, especially.
It is a good social psych lesson that people never attribute enough about the actions of others to their situations. It is a wonder that, even knowing that (and more than that), I can still make myself nauseous by committing that darn fundamental attribution error.
come home?
.:people:.
{ting}
she looks like the real thing
{mari}
out and about
[kelsey]
THIS IS AMERICA
{yianni}
stop being depressed
{alisa}
other
[shannon]
close and far
{frank}
islands where no islands should go
[cassie]
eating knowledge
{colin}
my dm
[emily]
shoulder to the wheel
[brian]
nostalgic for fantasy
[nicole]
industry insider
{elle}
angry enviro
[matt]
never heard of miyazaki
[pirate dan]
are you reading this?
[olga]
distracted
[messiah dan]
messiah/believer
{max}
approach focus
[natalie]
wait a minute
[susan]
solitude
{greg}
manbeargreg
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.:skin:.
turtles! turtles! by araglas
(heavily modified by yours truly)