walkingshadow: nihilistic thumbs up!! (sga: culture shock)
a. youtube link: finite simple group (of order two).

b. this month i managed to 1) have an anxiety attack over taking the fucking GRE1, 2) WRESTLE THE FUCKING GRE TO THE MOTHERFUCKING GROUND AND MAKE IT WISH IT HAD NEVER BEEN BORN IN A LOVELESS, FAUX-ACADEMIC ETS FACTORY2, 3) fall off my step at the gym and sprain my wrist3, and 4) drive into a tree.4 omgwtf OCTOBER.

c. as of last week, i'm officially done with studio 60. prospects were slightly brighter after "the long lead story," bright enough for me to draft a good news/bad news review that contained actual good news, but "the wrap party" was so exceedingly bad and boring that the show is now dead to me. the flist as a whole continues to be widely divided, and i find it fascinating: after the last episode aired, reactions ranged from "well, that was unspeakably offensive. guess i don't need to watch that anymore" to "this, this is good tv." interestingly, i'm seeing a lot of "please don't harsh our vibe" appeals from the fans, and i'd get irritated about that5, but i hear the show is dead to a growing majority of the general viewing audience and soon to be dead to the network, so whatever.

for anyone who's wondered either what the big deal about sorkin is in the first place, or why studio 60 is such a trainwreck, this is a great read.

d. let's talk about good television now!

heroes, farscape, entourage, battlestar galactica, etc. )

e. when i haven't been watching television, i've been shopping endlessly for a professional winter wardrobe oh god. not only is spending all this money making me twitchy, shopping in general is making me twitchy. questions i lie awake at night wondering about include: what to buy? what look to go for? where to go? how much to spend? how many black sweaters can i really justify owning? what about black skirts? i've been buying piecemeal from ann taylor loft and banana republic, and kansas pointed me to loehmann's—their stuff looks great, but until i get a bead on sizing, i'd like to get to a physical store and actually try things on first, rather than trial-and-error through the mail (see: the great zappos.com failure of the summer of 2006).

i have never in my life owned BOOTS, but this could be my year.

f. further on the subject of spending large sums of money, i've been pining after the apple macbooks and macbook pros, obsessively comparing and contrasting and building my dream models. in conclusion: i desperately want the macbook pro, for its faster processor, larger cache, bigger hard drive (though m. suggested buying one at 7200 rpm separately anyway), superior graphics card, and general all-around SHININESS6, but it's, you know, significantly more expensive, so it'll depend on how much my parents are willing to contribute as a belated graduation gift to make up the difference. but just wait till i get my paws on final cut express and subject you all to the vid ideas i've been hoarding for years!

g. i finished guns, germs, and steel a while ago, \o/; it only took three months of lunches. right now i'm working steadily through the world is flat, which is FASCINATING. i recommend them both very, very highly; more to come at some to-be-determined time in the future.

h. in between those books i made an aborted attempt to get through gödel, escher, bach, which is supposed to be about the manifestation of consciousness through what the author has dubbed "strange loops"—recursive paradoxes leading a system to become aware of itself—and it sounded awesome, but it was in fact NOT AWESOME, because of how fucking pretentious and self-indulgent the author was, i.e. so pretentious, i kept rolling my eyes so hard i was giving myself headaches; after his third dialogue cum monument to his own brilliance, i had to take it out back and shoot it. now i really want a t-shirt that says, "the first rule of the theory of linguistic types is you do not talk about the theory of linguistic types."7 fucking bertrand russell.

i. geoffrey pullum needs to calm down and possibly shut the hell up about linguification.

j. holy socially interactive events, batman: tabernacle EXTRAVAGANZA last weekend.8 on friday we saw the decemeberists—who were awesome, and all i asked was that they play sons and daughters, which they DID; and saturday we saw louis black, who was hilarious, and then followed him up with mind-meltingly good food at rathbun's asdkfjasl;dfj.

k. still putting pieces of paper in alphabetical order for a living. still no plan.


footnotes )
walkingshadow: nihilistic thumbs up!! (quite a fashionable dispassion)
a. okay, i joked about it, but i really don't know how to post anymore. i thank god every day for the alphabet.

b. i've been reading back through my old livejournal entries )

c. i feel like my brain is running at half-speed. this is probably due to four parts sleep-deprivation, three parts mental stagnation, two parts boredom, and one part despair.

d. for my birthday—not last thursday, but two weeks ago thursday—my dad woke me up at nine-thirty in the morning to take me to breakfast on the beach where it was very bright, oh god so bright on three hours of sleep, and then to a movie theater where the only thing showing was eight below which it turned out he'd really wanted to see; so basically for my birthday i was a better daughter than i am for the majority of the other 364 days of the year. and the movie wasn't terrible ) afterwards, i retreated to the house for an afternoon nap (because if you can't nap on your birthday WHEN CAN YOU) before heading up to ft. lauderdale for sushi with [livejournal.com profile] malelia_honu. the employees at hollywood video sent us home with dot the i's, but back at her place we watched our other rental, chris rock's most recent HBO special ("a father's only goal in life is to keep his daughter off the pole"). at home again late that night jules IMed me to wish me a happy birthday, and didn't mean to wreck me with helpful career and life guidance, but these things happen. you go to sleep wrecked, you wake up wrecked; may the new year be a good year for me.

e. i watched the oscars with [livejournal.com profile] malelia_honu because awards shows are wanktastic, but we do adore jon stewart. the next time i have to watch four hours of red carpet, montages, and acceptance speeches because jon stewart says so, i'm doing it with ALCOHOL. hey, who has an academy awards drinking game?

f. it was my grandmother's birthday the monday after mine. we bought her a plant and took her out for chinese food; she might have remembered why.

g. [livejournal.com profile] silentfire sent me a t-shirt because she's awesome and we're dorks and it's the funniest thing in life. i wore it and cracked myself up all day.

h. [livejournal.com profile] gjstruthseeker hopped the train from lakeland and came into town for the weekend, which in her world meant wednesday to friday last week. ostensibly it was a belated birthday celebration, and granted we did go downtown for thai and gelato, and to the beach for lunch and a walk in the water, and to jaxson's for ice cream, and she kept buying me meals, but the REAL purpose of the visit was to pimp me into battlestar galactica and then RUN. *shakes fist*

bsg reaction shot, 100% spoiler-free )

the discs weren't hers so she couldn't leave them with me, but still. STILL. the library will get them to me one of these days; of course, amazon would get them to me SOONER. perhaps blockbuster will make a middle ground.

i. oh, and also while jules was here we settled in for a good long chat about what i'm going to do with my life, featuring all sorts of rationalizations and navel-gazing on my part, and lots of praise and encouragement—highly flattering, though i still don't really believe most of it—on hers. conclusions! )

j. i think—i think—i've finally reached the ceiling on "i can't believe i'm STILL LIVING IN THIS HOUSE." it's not that it's horrible here; it's just that it's here, and i am ready, so very ready, for some new tensions in my life. i'm not asking for none, just different ones that the ones between my PARENTS and me, the same ones i've been ready to get away from for the last, you know, TWENTY-THREE YEARS. you never think you're going to be that person, but here you are.

k. inspired by the above, a short list of things i want, aka goals to work for )

l. we had dinner at my aunt c.'s house last friday and it was refreshingly not horribly boring. i watched paper moon with my dad when we get home, a movie i knew nothing about except for ryan and tatum o'neal, and i found it 100% charming. it's a period piece, and everything was right—the sepia, the accents, the bibles and the cars. two minutes into it, i went looking at the DVD box to find the director's name, because it was such beautiful, distinctive work: establishing a frame and allowing all the action of the scene to take place within it, without moving the camera. i thought it was fantastic.

m. saturday night [livejournal.com profile] malelia_honu and i were supposed to watch dot the i's, the movie we'd rented the weekend before, but she'd left it at work; so we watched high fidelity instead. that crazy john cusack! )

n. two people in two days randomly mentioned t. s. eliot's "four quartets" and i love t. s. eliot, and i went off on a, a thought tangent, in which i compared the process of reading a poem to playing a difficult musical piece, i.e. you generally break it down into component parts, work on the parts, work on the parts in combination, until eventually, with practice and repetition and concentration on the tricky bits, you understand all the parts and then can synthesize the parts into the whole and seamlessly play your way through it. which gives some element of production—or at least reconstruction—to the reading of a poem.

o. NCIS )

p. because house wasn't on this week and i always forget to watch scrubs akjhdfkashj, i watched supernatural: faith )

HOWEVER: this does fulfill my one-episode minimum prerequisite for fic-reading.

q. speaking of unpopular opinions: i suppose i could care less about march madness if i tried, but why expend the effort? on the other hand, there's no rain at indian wells right now, next week they're playing the nasdaq right in my own backyard, and the rest of the country doesn't even know who roger federer IS, so i figure we're even.

r. on wednesday i went with my mom to the aventura mall on a wild-goose chase for dishes. i ended up making a list of things i hate, including (but by no means limited to): 1) the city of aventura, 2) malls, 3) conspicuous consumption, 4) brand-name loyalty, and 5) people in general. this sunday she's dragging me off to sawgrass, oh god.

s. this week's criminal minds was a repeat, but i watched it anyway (because it's awesome) and it inspired me to finally, finally, for the love of god, make icons. I THINK I GOT MY MOJO BACK. i owed [livejournal.com profile] saturn92103 and [livejournal.com profile] leksa icons from, like, a month back, but i finally made good.

and then last week's criminal minds finally finished downloading at 7:30 this morning (coincidentally: also when i went to bed!) and i watched it this afternoon. it's all about hotch, except that it's all about all of them. it's like the west wing in the way that whoever's onscreen and speaking at that second is my absolute favorite. they're such a team, and they so obviously know and like each other, and they're good people, they do the right thing, or try. and in a way they're like, the anti-SGA, because they're so rarely stupid, and when they are stupid for, you know, a second, they realize later that hey! they were stupid! and then they FIX IT and THEY AREN'T STUPID ANYMORE. the concept is so strange and new!

t. yesterday was our weekly dinner at my grandmother's; we brought thai. she doesn't remember names most of the time anymore, but she still knows who i am. last week she'd forgotten that my grandfather had died a year and a half ago (my dad's dad, not her husband), and asked if anyone had heard from him recently. the other day she confided to cousin m. that my mom and dad looked like they might "make a go of it." last week she thought she was at our house, not her apartment, and asked as we were leaving whether anyone was going to take her home.

u. [livejournal.com profile] malelia_honu pulled me a virtual pint because in general she's, oh, a thousand times more awesome than i'll ever be. cheers, baby. here's to you.

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