there's Judy Garland taking Buddha by the hand

[walkingshadow]

Dear livejournal, how are you? I'm all caught up on the posted goings-on in your lives, but it has been ten days since my own last posting. There's this sense that one can say anything on livejournal, unburden oneself and confess oneself, without repercussions or Hail Marys or anyone even frowning at you like you should know better and they're not mad, just disappointed. If you've got your antennae up and your filters right, you even find people who'll applaud you for it, whatever it is. My entries tend more to the quotidian minutiae of the last book I read and what I had for lunch, but I miss my minutiae if I don't write about it. If nothing happened last Thursday—and around here, some days absolutely nothing happens—is it really so essential to document the fact? Why does it feel essential?

Anyway. To start from the present moment and work my way backward—no. To start from ten days ago and work my way forward to the present moment:

Did yoga on Thursday with malelia_honu and her mom; the instructor is going on a month-long vacation and we'll be having substitutes starting next week. Class was over at 8:30 and we got out of the parking garage a little before 9:00, at which time it was POURING and lightning and thundering and RAINING REALLY HARD. I did not drive home. Instead Mal and I retreated to her place where we ordered in Italian food and watched Zoolander with a break in the middle for the food and Without a Trace. By midnight the movie was over, Mal was falling asleep, and the rain had almost stopped.

*

The weather stayed clear enough on Friday for my mother and me to take my grandmother to the cemetary for my grandfather's yartzheit; it was technically June 14th, but as my mother said, we're more about the spirit of the law than the letter. The day before had been a very busy day for my grandmother, grocery shopping and maybe a trip to the bank, and she was very quiet and tired today. We took her home soon and my mother took me out to lunch. Over huge salads at Chili's I explained yet again that the problem re: choosing a career isn't finding something I like, it's finding something I like to do. I like everything. In naming the top five classes I'd taken at UF, I came up with Social Psychology, History of Urban America, Intro to Linguistics, Biological Anthropology, and, um. Hmm. I really liked calculus. I thought very hard about taking Calc III for fun, but never did. I never took any hard sciences, so I couldn't say whether or not I would have liked them. I feel cheated of my science education, going back to high school at least. My biology teacher was fabulous, but I didn't take anything away from chemistry or physics.

Anyway. I dropped my mother at home to make a cake and drove around collecting my contact lenses from the optometrist and my prescription from Walgreens. I got home in time to start reading kaneko's Intersections and get halfway through before we left for dinner at cousin M.'s. More people who watch a lot of television and don't have much else to talk about. I realize of course that many of the people on my friendslist watch a lot of television and a lot of their posting content is about just that, but the level of engagement on which they tend to watch is incomparable to my dinner companions'. I guess I wouldn't care what we were talking about as long as it were interesting, that it went beyond what their TiVo queues held.

I watched SG:A vids tonight and here's what I learned:

• The special effects are CHEESETASTIC. This, I'm guessing, is purposely done to carry on the great cheesetastic sci-fi tradition, right? Right?



• Elizabeth Weir and Joyce Summers could be sisters. Maybe they ARE. I have read stranger crossovers.


• John and Rodney often mirror each other's body language. I don't know whose decision that was (the actors' or the director's), but it says an awful lot about familiarity and compatibility.


• I adore John Sheppard. I can only hope his voice doesn't break my heart, because he is adorable. ADORABLE. There's this scene where he and Elizabeth are talking and he turns away from her, toward the camera, and quirks an eyebrow and that? Is hot.


• I read a story just the other day where Carson remarked that Rodney would be good for John because he (John) tended to be melancholy and Rodney would be a lightening force. I thought that was interesting—not wildly out of character or anything, but Rodney tends to be painted as the doom-and-gloom guy while John—hmm. This is what happens when you skip canon and proceed directly to the fanfic. My impressions of these characters are composites of the impressions of fifty authors. The danger of fanon is that even the aspects of character on which authors tend to agree are not necessarily true. But from what I've seen (and in a vid I only get to see, not hear), John tends to smirk more than smile, and not sustain it. He also shoots dirty looks and sour faces. Even his smiles don't often ring true. Does he laugh often? He seems like the kind of guy whose real laughs are few and far between and take him by surprise when they come. Rodney looks like he has good-time fun! It could certainly be a function of the clip-selection, but he's often smiling and laughing and downright gleeful—he looks like he's having fun in this life. Not when he's shooting a gun, or when guns are pointed at him, but you know. Generally. Rodney might have a hair-trigger panic button, but his mood and overall global outlook seem lighter and more positive than John's: John strikes me as the paranoid—maybe even fatalistic—type, who goes around expecting the worst and doesn't get worked up when bad things happen because he knew they were bound to. Rodney is extremely expressive and can, without being unstable, run the entire range of emotions in the course of a single day or mission or half-hour. The first season is out on DVD soon, right? I'm really curious to see them in action.


• Atlantis is lighted a whole lot more darkly than I'd imagined.


• Aiden is cute as a button. Has he had his bar mitzvah yet?

Still to come: a rambling and incoherent discussion of giftedness in my favorite fictional characters.

I watched the trailer for Serenity again and am very excited about September. I don't know how much crossover there is between the fandoms, but I'm guessing everybody already knows David Krumholtz is in the movie, right? Playing a character called "Mr. Universe"?

*

Saturday was one of those days when nothing happened. I watched tennis; I did nothing; I did nothing; I read fic online; I fetched take-out with my mother for dinner; I started Fermat's Enigma, a history of the solving of his Last Theorem. I'm up to the twentieth century.

*

Tennis coverage started at noon on Sunday. I slouched around the house after that until my parents go out to dinner and I watched the last disk of Dead Like Me; in more when-my-fandoms-collide news, Kaylee of Firefly was the goth girl in Episode 114, "Rest In Peace".

Then I found SG-1 fic by paian omg. I have started reading SG-1 fic. But, come on! This was inevitable, right? Right? Guys? Half the authors I know and love write in SG-1 and a handful of the reccers I trust the most have been reccing SG-1 for months and years, but I'm taking suggestions.

The dog came in just when the thunder and rain started in the small hours, leaning close for me to scratch his ears and belly and croon at him that the big noise couldn't hurt him before he laid down on my foot to sleep.

*

I went to bed in the small hours of Monday morning (so small they were almost big again) and tried to get up three hours after going to bed for shopping with my mother, as planned, but though I have a very clear recollection of setting my alarm for nine a.m., I have no memory of turning it off again. My mom came in at a quarter to ten to get me up, told me not to rush, take my time, etc. I set tennis to tape and we hit the Pembroke Mall. We came home exhausted five or six hours later and stopped at Publix on the way home for essentials (mostly fruit); we made dinner and I watched the tennis I'd taped and was very, very tired.

*

My last dentist visit was in 2002. On Tuesday both the hygienist and the dentist chewed me out for getting lost for three years, and then grudgingly proceeded to tell me my teeth look great. I think they almost would have loved to find half a dozen cavities, just so they could say "see? See?! This is what happens!" Except nothing happened: three years and no decay. I've never had a cavity. I brush thoroughly, I floss nightly, and he said if I keep doing what I'm doing I'll have my teeth until I'm a hundred and twenty. They both said I should think about having my teeth bleached. I'm thinking about it.

I came home jubilant only to find my mother had been crying but was too upset to talk about it, just that "[we? I?] have to move." She said telling me why would just make her cry more, and she had errands to run. This is a bad thing to do to me! I have an extremely vivid imagination. I am paranoid. My first thought was financial disaster. My second was personal/medical disaster. My third was divorce. Common sense started kicking in soon after, as I remembered that if any of those things were true, *moving* would be the least of all difficulties; and my dad had absolutely no idea what was going on, hadn't even known my mother was upset before she left; he did say she had talked to her school principal before she left, maybe she'd heard bad news? Should he call back and see? And I was like, don't call anybody, Mom will tell us when she's ready, etc. I worked out that it's likely she'll have to move classrooms within the school. This will be a total bitch. It's something like the fifth move in as many years and she was pretty invested in this room already, had unpacked things and set them up, and moving will be a bitch—but it'll get done. There's a lot to be said for the worst-case scenario.

I watched taped tennis! and then went to the 5:00 yoga, with Jason as instuctor this time: he was cool, he led class just like Tim at UF had. He gave us the option of doing a backbend instead of a bridge, which, whoo, should have helped my brain, according to this article. I'd gotten back the results of my bloodwork from last week: I am an extremely healthy human being; I need to eat more fish. My triglycerides are 67, my HDL cholesterol is 78 (total: 130) though my LDL is only 39 and that could be higher. Iron is fine, blood sugar is fine; as I remarked to my father, imagine if I were actually still working out five days a week.

We had an excellent dinner when I got back, a sort of alternative picnic: split-pea burgers a la Alton Brown, homemade baked sweet potato chips, corn salad, salad salad. We watched House, "Detox": how can they not differentiate between physical and mental addiction? I ask you. Have we seen any evidence at all that he gets high off the Vicodin and wants that high for itself? There was that fuzziness in the very last scene, very ambiguous, but has there been anything else? But this—"I've been alienating people since I was three"—that is so true! People like that are born, not made. Most facets of personality are innate, and they might mellow or sharpen as we get older, but however you are is probably how you always were.

As I mentioned the other day in isilya's journal, it's laughable what these doctors do. Are they the only five doctors in the hospital? Okay, plus Cuddy, the token administrator. Are there no nurses? No lab technicians? The ducklings do EVERYTHING. They draw blood, they run scans, they perform autopsies and brain surgery. What is the head of Oncology doing up in Diagnostics all the time? In what universe would he draw blood himself? Whatever. I am entertained.

*

On Wednesday my mother and I made a heroic effort at all-day shopping at Sawgrass and were immensely successful. We worked our way through five stores (with a break for a delicious lunch at the Cheesecake Factory) and found shoes and shirts and skirts before losing the will to live. We brought home sandwiches for dinner but were still too full from lunch to eat them. I'd gotten about seventy pages into The Tipping Point before my parents and I went to see Batman: I was disappointed. My mistake was in listening to so many positive critical and personal reviews and getting my hopes up. Hope is fatal. No spoilers here, but—it dragged. The plot was no worse than any other superhero movie I've seen, but considering how much there should have been going on, it all felt too thin and insubstantial. I've never liked Chrisitan Bale and, though I'd heard very good things about him here, I still don't like Christian Bale. He's unattractive, and he can't juggle his teeth and his lines in his mouth at the same time. I wasn't impressed with either his acting or his presence in the role. I liked Katie Holmes better than I liked him. And this is me flagging down the Cillian Murphy bandwagon and clambering aboard. I'm genetically disposed—or contractually obligated, or something—to find Cillian Murphy very attractive, as he has dark hair and light eyes, PLUS high, sharp cheekbones and a great mouth. And he's so wee! Is he not wee?

I'd taped the tennis that aired this morning, but I was so tired by the time the Wimbledon update was over at midnight and I already knew Roddick had won his match, so I went to sleep instead. Shocking, I know.

*

I met S. for lunch at Sweet Tomatoes on Thursday—a working lunch that included a study session for the dreaded GRE. I love math; I just don't remember much of it. Still uncertain as to how knowing low-frequency vocabulary words out of context and without benefit of a dictionary will make me a better graduate student. Please advise.

The yoga instructor this time focused largely on breathing and energies, chanting to begin and end. Sanskrit still sounds very much like Hebrew; she tried to tell someone after class that Sanskrit was the first language, from which all other languages come, and that babies call their mothers "ma" in all languages because of the inherent vibrations that all objects sent out, which we all intuitively pick up on and know, even babies know, when they don't know the words. Um. Yes. Or, you know. No. But the class was good.

Instead of going home right afterward I sat with Mal in Dunkin' Donuts for an hour or two, drinking coffee and eating donuts and singing along with the music, the same music that was playing last time we were in here, and the tape started repeating within the hour. I dealt the first three games and turned over the Queen of Hearts all three times. The odds of that are 1 in 140,608. I also kicked ass in the game, but that'll all even out next time. It always does.

That night I finished The Tipping Point and found it fascinating. Aside from being fascinating in its own right, with the case studies and the examination of Paul Revere's sociability, it was like a walk down Social Psych memory lane. One of his first endnotes referenced Granovetter's "Threshold Models of Collective Behavior" and I had to smack my forehead for not anticipating that one. The Granovetter threshold! is the number of people who have to do something before you'll do it too. For some people, this number is zero: they are the people who go first. Then everyone in the crowd whose threshold is one follows; say there were ten of them: then everyone whose threshold is between two and ten follows them, etc., and soon everyone rushes the field after the game, or starts looting the store, or buying a cellphone, or whatever. There have to be enough people whose threshold is low enough (and some other restrictions may apply) or you've just got one guy rushing the field and getting picked off by security.

*

As of Friday, my parents have been married for thirty-two years. We all went to lunch at a Chinese restaurant in downtown Hollywood and to dinner at a French restaurant on Las Olas Boulevard. I recycled their anniversary card from last year (I was in England at the time and forgot to send it off) and gave them a tiny DVD player for use in the kitchen (installed in thirty seconds or less; it took longer to make room for it in the cabinet) and Field of Dreams. May they use them in good health.

*

My toes hurt from having separators in for most of the day. I've manicured and pedicured and painted, for fun but also for the wedding tomorrow. I'm going to a wedding tomorrow; it's completely bizarre. We were invited, by phone, about two weeks ago; it's cousins on my father's side whom I have never met. My mother and I are strongly of the opinion that we either 1) were entirely forgotten until now or 2) are third-tier guests; neither is particularly flattering. I was all "have fun! I'll be over here, not at this wedding!" but my dad appealed to me with I would really like for you to be there, so I'm going. I won't know anyone at all, but maybe the food will be good?

I was up early this morning, intentionally, for Breakfast at Wimbledon! My mother made scones and I made tea, and I ate strawberries but drank no champagne—I thought it a bit much for 9 a.m. First Roddick and Johannson had to finish their semifinal match, rained out from yesterday: it's going to be Roddick and Federer in the final tomorrow morning, unsurprisingly. Today it was Venus Williams over Lindsay Davenport in three dramatic sets. She had to come back from match-point down to win—the last time a woman had done that in the finals at Wimbledon was 1935.

*

ETA: Didn't manage to get this posted last night. My mom poked her head in my room at five after nine (and lucky that she did; an alarm is all well and good, but one can snooze indefinitely) and I roused myself for Breakfast at Wimbledon, Day Two: all about Roger Federer in straight sets over Roddick. Straight as an arrow, such a clean match, something like 48 winners and 11 unforced errors, no double faults—just beautiful tennis. It was great to watch, because the man is an absolute rock through two weeks and seven matches, giving absolutely nothing away, until his last serve went unreturned for an ace, and he threw up his hands in victory, then fell on the ground and burst into tears. Really, he was smiling and obviously elated, he hugged Roddick when he came around to his side of the net, and shook the chair umpire's hand, and sat in his chair and sobbed into his towel. His third straight Wimbledon championship and he's never really been tested. It's not a rivalry if only one of you ever wins.

I keep wandering around the house blurting out, "tell me again why I'm going to this wedding?" Damned if I know. I'd bring a book if I could. At least my nails are pretty.

Comments

[tenebris.livejournal.com]

First of all, though your entries are long and sometimes quotidian, they are a lot of fun to read when you have time to read them. Whee! Welcome back. :) Also, Flexible Squares default=popular and pretty, neh?

I've never liked Chrisitan Bale and, though I'd heard very good things about him here, I still don't like Christian Bale. He's unattractive, and he can't juggle his teeth and his lines in his mouth at the same time.

Although I came out of the theater liking the movie more than you did--I think--I had serious problems with the first half of his performance, for the reasons you cite. My friends were like, "Yeah, Christian Bale!" and my response was, "When he can keep his mouth shut!" (Which he finally learned to do, later on.) Also, Cillian Murphy is SO pretty, and I really need a screenshot of his one crazy moment. :)

she tried to tell someone after class that Sanskrit was the first language, from which all other languages come,

*sniggers* Ah yes, language. We can say anything about you, can't we?

And you're going to the wedding for cake! Cake, I tell you!

[walkingshadow.livejournal.com]

It is pleasant to be back, thank you! Heh, this entry was SO LONG because I kept updating into the same window but never actually finishing the damn thing so I could post it. Flexible Squares is very popular, but I just changed over last night, so I don't know how I feel about it yet. I have to mess with the colors and the preferences a bit. I loved the Boxer with all my heart, but then I got bored. Because I am fickle like that.

My friends were like, "Yeah, Christian Bale!" and my response was, "When he can keep his mouth shut!"

Ahaha! Yes, exactly! Except not even then, really. Personal dislike aside, I just don't think he has the gravitas to play Batman. Bruce Wayne is one fucked-up man and all Christian Bale can pull off is rebellious rich boy makes good. The actual Begins stuff was really cool, though: how he learned to move and fight like that, where the Batcave came from, what Arkham is all about and where all the crazy criminals came from. The first time Cillian Murphy came on screen I was like, "omg HELLO." Pretty, pretty, pretty.

Ah yes, language. We can say anything about you, can't we?

Sure we can! Who needs their facts substantiated? Sanskrit as the oldest language was something the Hare Krishnas mentioned to me when I visited with them. Just because it's old doesn't mean it's the oldest, guys. Sorry.

And you're going to the wedding for cake! Cake, I tell you!

Dude, that would have been something to look forward to. I didn't even think of it until now, and it's probably a good thing, because there wasn't any. I just mentioned it to my mom and she hadn't noticed either. Weird!

[tenebris.livejournal.com]

I should try that, actually; I often have things to say that never get there because, well, I flit away from the computer. Hmm...

And you've changed the colors, I notice! Very nice. I'm not so fickle on this LJ (aside from adding text to the Component and tweaking small things), but the 'fic LJ gets overhauled three, four times a year. It's nice to have some place to change things up.
*
I didn't so much have a problem with Bale's gravitas, though I really think the only person who ever pulled off *Bruce Wayne* was Kilmer. Bale was also a little too ragey with the Batman voice, but I'm forever spoiled by Kevin Conroy, so what do I know? I loved the movie for all the Begins things you mentioned--showing how Bruce got to where he was. And for Michael Caine's accent, of course, because it's a thing only a linguist would love, and want to create serious backstory for. 'Cause upper class Brit he is NOT.

Cillian Murphy is waay too gorgeous for his own good. Cheekbones and eyes, man; it'll getcha every time. :) And that's a gorgeous icon, too. I think I'll be seeing this movie again...
*
*shakes head* People always forget Sumeria, don't they? (I would talk about PIE, but most people really do think it is a flaky dessert with some sort of filling. And then I am sad, for a little bit.)
*
No CAKE? How odd!

[walkingshadow.livejournal.com]

New colors! How summery, no? It is good to change things up every now and then.

And for Michael Caine's accent, of course, because it's a thing only a linguist would love, and want to create serious backstory for. 'Cause upper class Brit he is NOT.

Yes, his accent! I pulled up short the first time I heard it, all "hello, and where are you from?" There has to be a good story to that, as to how a man with that accent comes to be holding that position in that particular spot in the world. As for playing Bruce Wayne on the big screen, I don't know if anyone can really portray how truly dark and weird the man is, as well as the world he's built around himself and the people he draws to him. Without completely alienating the average movie-going audience, I mean. I know I'm only aware of all of that (by which I mean a *fraction* of it) through tangential exposure to the comics themselves. All that aside, I think Val Kilmer did make a really good Batman. I saw the Michael Keaton version a while ago, but I think I need to go back and revisit it, because my memories of that one are all really positive too.

(P.S. I am trying to make more Cillian Murphy icons, but am finding it strangely difficult to find iconable pictures. You'd think a boy that pretty would photograph well, right?)

(I would talk about PIE, but most people really do think it is a flaky dessert with some sort of filling. And then I am sad, for a little bit.)

I'll be sad with you. And then, weirdly, I'll crave some pie with my historical linguistics overview.

(I know! How could there not be CAKE?)

[leksa.livejournal.com]

babies call their mothers "ma" in all languages

har. it's sad if the mother speaks a non-"ma = mother"-type language then, not being able to recognize her baby's universal call and all, i suppose.

[walkingshadow.livejournal.com]

That would be SO SAD. I just listened to her while she was explaining it, and I was like, yes, mother is "ma" in all languages except for the ones that it isn't. Granted, the words for parents (at least the baby-versions of them) in most languages tend to be mono-syllabic or reduplicated bilabial consonants (or dental/alveolar, up in the front of the mouth) plus unrounded, open vowels (ma, pa, ba, da, mama, etc.), but that's basically because those are the first sounds babies are able to produce. And parents are like, "they must mean me!" The chicken and the egg, right? Or maybe I mean universal vibrations.