the best imitation of myself

a. I've been in my new place for almost two months, and they haven't even made noises about kicking me out yet! I call that SUCCESS.

b. Remember that time an adorable toddler tipped a glass of water all over my laptop and it stopped working, and then through a combination of seasonal holiday mall shenanigans, the Great Icing Over of 2011, personal transportation issues, and deep denial, it was weeks before I could get to the Apple Store for an assessment, during which I spiraled deeper and deeper into isolation and depression? Well, Apple told me they would happily fix anything that ailed it for a standard flat fee that wasn't necessarily unreasonable, but WAS more than a month's rent—and therefore prohibitively expensive—thereby knocking me out of the fourth stage of grief where I'd been stalled for some time; and THEN gjstruthseeker swooped in like the most bad-ass, technologically-advanced fairy godmother EVER and surprised me with a brand-spanking-new machine. I think I teared up a little as I took it out of the box. I HAVE JUST MET YOU, I told it, AND I LOVE YOU. We're going to be so, so happy together. I hope one day to be able to return the favor a thousandfold. <333333

c. I'm totally going to learn to vid on my new boss laptop, no really, seriously, this time I mean it! I've got a bunch of tutorials to sift through, but so far they all seem to go something like,

1. Acquire source
2. Convert to editing-compatible format
3. Clip
4. Import
5. ????
6. Profit! Export

Is it me, or is there an important part of the vidding process missing, i.e. THE VIDDING. D:

d. If I ever figure out iMovie, my first vid is PROBABLY going to be an ode to methodology and police procedure on Hawaii Five-0. NO, WAIT, I MEAN—what's the opposite of an ode?

e. Hawaii Five-0: I just. I have so many feelings.

f. So last fall I made some new friends (a hilarious story for another day), and one night after hanging out and drinking all afternoon, they were like, let's go to the 3-Legged Cowboy! which is a local gay & lesbian country-western bar in Midtown, and I was like suuuuure, sounds awesome, because I had been drinking all afternoon. And it turns out I LOVE DANCING, YOU GUYS. YOU GUYS, I LOVE DANCING. I didn't know how to do any of it, either the line dances or the two-step, but they gave me the Cliffs Notes version and told me there were free lessons during the week. So I came for the lessons (it turns out that line dancing is exactly like all those hundreds of hours of choreographed aerobics I adored, only WITH BONUS DRINKING; also it's HARDER, because you have to memorize the routines, and there are like a thousand fucking routines, this shit is hardcore), and sometimes silentfire would come too, and I would stay and drink and dance the dances I knew, even though sometimes I felt horribly awkward because PEOPLE OMG, and it's hard to be a human being, but I got to talking with a couple of people, and one of them was like, heyyy do you want to join our dance troupe? Because it turns out there is an actual thing called the International Association of Gay/Lesbian Country Western Dance Clubs, and they host dance competitions; and after being assured that I really didn't need any actual prior knowledge or dancing ability, I was like, what the hell, okay! And now I have paid club dues and everything, and we're learning ballroom dances and jazz choreography, and basically I love every minute of it. Dancing! WHO KNEW.

g. Today I spent several hours in the DMV sitting in a molded plastic chair with my crossword puzzles and some podcasts, along with what seemed like half the population of metro Atlanta, including A BABY THAT CRIED FOR AN HOUR STRAIGHT. I mean, that poor kid, Jesus, but also my nerves are never going to be the same again. But now I have a Georgia driver's license! My picture is totally horrifying, I look like I'm drunk, so I figure all is right with the world.

h. It's my birthday tomorrow! In my time zone, tomorrow happened forty-five minutes ago. :D

i. What would I do without lists? I would never post again, that's what. HI, INTERNET!

a. I always find alphabetical lists are easier to read through than big bunches of unorganized paragraphs. They're at least more easily skimmed, amirite?

b. Have gotten my babysitting job back, which is fortunate, since I haven't got any other jobs at the moment.

c. A. has finally served me notice of eviction, in the kindest, most passive-aggressive way possible, so I will definitely be moving into a place of my own sometime soon, probably! Or else!

d. It really slammed into me tonight how much I miss gjstruthseeker. For years I had her within arms' reach (or at least within a stone's throw), and now for years she's been halfway around the world, not even a phone call away. I adore the friends I have here, and I know I need to get better at making and keeping new ones, but I miss her so much.

e. Chanukah came so early this year (and I am in such tenuous and sporadic contact with most of the members of my family) that three of my non-Jewish friends were the first to tell me about it. I should probably put that kind of thing on my calendar. HAPPY CHANUKAH, EVERYONE (WHO CELEBRATES IT). I hope you have all seen this. :D

f. Sometimes I download episodes of television from the internet, and then I watch them! And SOMETIMES I then read massive amounts of fanfiction about it, or about other things and/or people!* One day I will again post about these phenomena.

g. Recently I revisited the Enneagram online personality test and it SPOKE to my SOUL.** Between that and internet research wrt Avoidant Personality Disorder, I have gotten a much better sense of my actual current state of mind and being than therapy ever gave me. Not that it's solved anything, but then therapy never did either.

h. AM SO DRUNK RIGHT NOW WHAT.


* Most of them I bookmark here, though I'm dreadfully behind.
** [Unhealthy] Type Four.

In no particular order:

a. HIPSTER DINOSAURS. This is my new favorite thing in the world. "I remember when this volcano was dormant. This volcano used to have integrity."

b. I have had the most amazing tension headache all day today. The muscles behind my ears are so tight and tender they feel like twin goose eggs.

c. I saw Inception the week after it was released, because I was so excited about it and the cut tags were so full of exclamation marks; I think I can sum up my feelings about it by saying I immediately went home and wrote up four thousand words in reaction to it, but I didn't actually care. I.e.: ambivalence.

d. My main fandom at the moment is Due South. I know, right? This is something like my sixth Due South personal renaissance since 2001. I've just re-watched the entire series (most episodes for the very first time!), and I'm reading (and re-reading) what feels like ALL the fic. Those guys! I have a vid idea that I want to make so badly, I can actually listen to the song on repeat and watch it in my head. Though if it's like every other vid I've ever wanted to make, it will never make it out of my head. :/

e. I don't think I've mentioned the job I've had since April, which is babysitting a (now) 17-month-old during the day while his parents are at work (and their three dogs, whom I loathe; but the kid is great). A partial list of things I have successfully taught him to date: his first word ("hi"); where his nose is; The Itsy-Bitsy Spider; The Wheels on the Bus; how to high-five; to pick things up when he drops them; to cheer for Roger Federer.

f. I'm in the middle of one crochet project and three knitting projects, with half a dozen more in the pipeline.

g. In the space of about two weeks I went from "I still don't get this podfic stuff!" to being OBSESSED with podfic—both the listening to and the recording thereof. I've already begun systematically ransacking the audiofic archive, but is there a good source of podfic meta/discussion anywhere handy? I have so many questions!

h. silentfire and I are playing late-night trivia again tonight, having taken second place three times in the past few weeks. Last week's was a thrilling come-from-behind success story, in which knowledge of—yes!—the names of all the presidents of the United States was the crucial bit of knowledge we had to call upon.

i. It's U.S. Open time! FEDERER OR BUST.

j. I'm meeting up with gjstruthseeker and her husband in Orlando in a few weeks, which should be extremely awesome; and I'm almost definitely going to North Carolina in October for the SAFF with, like, all of my female relatives, about which I am considerably more ambivalent.

k. I don't want to jinx it, but it's been a few days now, and I'm starting to believe that summer might actually be almost over. Oh god, this summer has been so wretched. And that's only taking into account the WEATHER.

l. White Collar! How is that show even REAL?!

m. This morning P. (the father of the kid I sit for) and I were discussing revenge narratives in the literary and cinematic canons, as well as in real life—specifically, ones in which the seeker of revenge is consumed and ultimately destroyed by his own obsessive quest, e.g. Moby Dick. I pointed out that we were finding it harder than expected to come up with examples because we currently celebrate and privilege that kind of story, and it more often ends in triumph than tragedy. I explained the concept of ~manpain. Any suggestions?

a. thanksgiving by the numbers: TWO parents and ONE cousin up from florida for SEVEN days, ONE niece home from college, and TWO in-laws driving down, for a total of ELEVEN people staying in the house. TWENTY-ONE bodies for dinner on thursday. SEVENTEEN bodies on friday. approximately FORTY BILLION hours spent cooking in the kitchen: FOUR kinds of sweet potatoes, THREE cranberry relishes, TWO stuffings, and TWELVE pies served. ONE afternoon spent at the atlanta botanical gardens, ONE morning spent at the high museum's louvre exhibit, ONE night at the movies, TWO nights at home watching videos, ONE day of running errands to confirm the uselessness of best buy and drinking margaritas at neighbor's with m. and cousin m. and kansas.

all told, not a bad week. cousin m. and i talked about how lucky we are in our family that everyone's so laid-back; some people have their little irritations, and our dad scrapes against our nerves like we're cats getting rubbed the wrong way, but it's just dad being dad. no one fights, no one gets drunk and embarrassing, no one yells. everyone's nerves were badly fraying by sunday night, but we KEPT IT TOGETHER. returning to work on monday was strange and brutal. what were these piles of paper for? what was i to do with them? and why? i asked myself, "how did i get here?"

b. intervention: we took informal bets on how many times during the course of the very, very long weekend i would be asked what i was up to, what my plans were, WHAT I WAS DOING WITH MY LIFE, but our estimations failed to take into account my niece's wildcard presence as a first-semester college student, and most of the boilerplate life questions ended up deflected her way. for the record, she's highly stressed and very unhappy in her major, but she's making lots of friends and seems to be having fun, so we're hoping next semester will be better; and after that she'll evaluate.

no, all the impatience and worry about the course of my life were deferred until my parents and cousin m. were on the way to the airport, when my mother unloaded; luckily i wasn't there, but my brother seems to have gotten an earful. on wednesday night he and i went across the street to THE RIGHTEOUS ROOM (no lie!) for dinner, compliments of my father ("here, take your sister out"), and after we ordered our first round and debated whether or not i should partition my hard drive (see below), m. handed me a present:

me: wow, what have i done lately?!
me: *unwraps package to reveal a copy of what color is your parachute?*
me: ahhh, it's what i haven't done lately.

and he reported the earful he'd gotten from our mother, and we came up with a plan of sorts, and he gave me ASSIGNMENTS with DEADLINES, e.g. read the book, investigate night classes at emory and georgia state, solicit references for a therapist—because it's time! maybe!—and we ate onion straws and drank many more rounds and then stumbled home drunk.

c. the power of apple compelled me: in fact, i was too drunk to turn on the SUPER-SHINY APPLE COMPUTER that had that day been delivered into my feverish consumer hands! i opted for the macbook—in white, like the white album is white, like it should be playing honey piiiiiiiiii-aiiiiiiiie, i love you! ALL THE TIME—with two gigs of RAM and a 120GB hard drive and final cut express preinstalled for the fulfillment of all my pirating, surfing, songvidding needs. obviously i also opted not to wait ONE MINUTE LONGER. so on thursday when i got home, i booted it up and transferred all the contents and settings of ezekiel to the new computer (new computer still has no name. *frets*) and then spent the rest of the night downloading widgets and arranging them to my satisfaction on the desktop and playing bubble trouble, a game that you should not download for the love of god, unless you don't mind losing YEARS OF YOUR LIFE to it. i tell you this as a friend.

it's so shiny, you guys. SO SHINY. and super-duper awesomely fast, and at first it was running plastic-meltingly hot and the fan was whirring like a jet engine and the battery drained after an hour and a half; but i ran activity monitor, and immediately after disabling the new york times headlines-retrieving widget i'd been running, the fan died down to nothing and the battery time left increased by a hundred percent. o.O i didn't need to be globally informed ANYWAY. over the weekend i tried to trick out safari, becuase i know it's fast and native and passes the acid test, but i couldn't configure it to my satisfaction (i can't find a del.icio.us client that works for me—cocoalicious refuses to load my bookmarks and delibar is only for browsing—and i somehow resent having to pay for saft to plug some—but by no means all—of the holes in safari that inexplicably haven't already been plugged by apple. session saving? hello?) so instead i further tricked out firefox and am finding new extensions all the time. i mugged for the photobooth camera and watched apple's famous 1984 ad and then the spoof of apple's famous 1984 ad, and then some of my favorite songvids on the wide, glossy screen.

we're going to be very happy together.

d. saturday: i found myself in an incredibly bad mood friday night, toward the end of happy hour and on the drive home. i played listlessly with the computer for an hour or so, and then went to bed and slept for fourteen hours. i felt a lot more human saturday morning, i won't lie. met m. and kansas at taco mac down the street, and then we checked out the telephone factory lofts art show; there i saw a photograph of goldfish that filled me with rage, and we found, possibly, the perfect artwork for kansas's kitchen. i watched football all afternoon and evening, FOOTBALL of all things, at m.'s apartment with m. and his friend c.: USC and UCLA (which i feel compelled to pronounce yoocla when it's written out in lowercase) and then florida vs. arkansas, and i asked m. a million questions like why were they lining up like that, and how many time-outs did they get, and when could they kick a field goal, which he very patiently answered in between cursing the gators and cheering them and their chances at the championship. which i understand they now have!

we ordered thai and when the games were over we flipped channels to find the last thirty minutes of van helsing, which was AWFUL, except for david wenham saying that if there was one thing he'd learned, it was never be the first to stick your hand in a viscous liquid.

e. visitors from beyond the perimeter: silentfire and i have been like busy ships with conflicting schedules playing phone tag and passing in the night, but yesterday she drove down to play dueling laptops and trade music and roll around in fandom. we ate sushi and walked across the street to publix in the cold to get ice cream, and watched the first episode of life on mars, which we think is groovy!

f. don't jinx it: i'm applying—i think?—to this graduate program, and i'm almost afraid to mention it; it was a capricious, spur-of-the moment decision i made when i tripped over its website last week, and i've been busily regretting it and fourteenth-guessing it even as i go about drafting emails to solicit letters of recommendation and fretting over a STATEMENT OF OBJECTIVES, and the deadline's january fifteenth, so it may all come to NOTHING. but there it is. *bites nails*

g. it was twenty-eight degrees out on the drive to work this morning: i feel GREAT today! even after resolving to get the number for a therapist, and the nightmarish prospect of contacting old professors, and the reams of paper under which i am buried at work! i think it's the weather! and the fact that the computer bag i ordered last week—the one that departed california last wednesday and took what sounds like a lovely road trip through illinois, indiana, ohio, and tennessee—should be arriving at the office MOMENTARILY. i love package tracking and plunging mercury and the WORLD.

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 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 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. 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. 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 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 saturn92103 and 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. 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.

ahaha, so isilya used livejournal's new nudge feature to say, "hello, please post now kthx." i am tickled pink by this. it's just that i have so little to say. things that have been nominally worth noting in the month of january thus far:

a. my parents and i were in atlanta over the holiday weekend, for my brother m.'s birthday, but also just to visit. it turned out we were in perfect time for a cold front, a good excuse to break out the sweaters and scarves—and while i was there i finished one for my brother and then ransacked l.'s yarn collection to start a new one for my mother, in a slightly desperate attempt to stave off boredom, of all things. i don't usually get bored at these family gatherings, but there i was: wandering upstairs and downstairs, pacing from room to room, uninvolved and uninterested in the conversation.

we ate a lot—surprise, surprise!—and while the new aquarium was booked solid (and their telephone support system leaves a lot to be desired), we did get to the andrew wyeth exhibit at the high museum, which was engrossing and fantastic. as the captions and audioguide kept telling me, his works are highly symbolic and generally deal with memory, imagination, and death. and maybe the guides were a little repetitive, but i had a much better grasp of both his intentions and their execution by the time i finished than i had when i started: i knew better what to look for and what it meant when i found it. and technically his work is just beautiful. one of the last paintings in the exhibit was a portrait of a woman, entitled braids, and it was so simple and beautiful and rich in texture and detail—the ribbing of her turtleneck, the few wispy flyaways from her loose braids, her blonde eyelashes, her nose, her cheekbones and complexion—that i stared at it for long minutes, came back to it a second and third time, and could probably have looked at it all day.

b. i tried to hold out on the last volume of his dark materials, but i had seventy pages left by the time our plane touched down in ft. lauderdale monday night, and i finished it as soon as we got home. ( more )

so, yes, i loved it with all my heart. undying gratitude again to trinityofone for tipping me into checking it out, and to bunnymcfoo for supplying the means. isilya, i would dearly love to hear your commentary.

c. sometimes i get sleepy at around eight in the evening—which is kind of like a midday nap, if you tend to tear youself away from the internet at four in the morning and crawl out of bed at two in the afternoon. i mean, right?

d. okay, yes, basically my sleep habits are for absolute shit. yesterday i got a text message at eleven a.m.; i got up at noon to stop the phone from beeping, went to the bathroom, fed the cat, then fell back into bed and had to drag myself out of it at three. when i got back from the gym last night, after a solid workout, my mom did a double-take and said i looked like i'd just gotten woken up. ha ha!

e. for the record, this makes three days in a row i've been to the gym. do not give me a cookie, for the love of god.

f. when gjstruthseeker was here a couple of weeks ago, not only did we watch SGA and meditate extensively upon the characters of john sheppard and rodney mckay et al., we plotted out SONGVIDS. i find myself in the market for vid tutorials! oh my god, i know absolutely nothing about it. i expect to be pathetically grateful for vidder_weekly. and now that we've started plotting songvids, we can't stop. we are completely ruined for music now. nothing is safe.

g. my dreams don't tend to go to apocalyptic fannish places, but they did the other night! think reign-of-terror meets high-school-AU. for "guillotine" read "mass disembowelings in the cafeteria."

h. how do you read? i must use whole-word recognition to some extent, because i have—hmm, not quite orthographic, maybe topological?—problems sometimes: i confuse words that look alike. that is, i have trouble when ronon and rodney are in the same story, or jack and john, etc. i always have to go back and re-read more carefully. this is the same problem i have with r. kelly and rilo kiley (which also sound alike, except that i don't pronounce words when i read them; that's the bonus of reading, that you don't have to figure out how to say passepartout, you just recognize it when you see it and move on), who you'd think would be easy enough to differentiate.

also, in my head ang lee is a woman, i swear. i should look up a picture or something.

i. former-roommate s. came back from her fabulous internship and invited me over for dinner the other night. she made salmon; i read her personal essay for admittance to a master's program; we talked and talked, we watched the daily show with jon stewart. a pleasant evening, all around! i ought to reciprocate soon, or at least make arrangements to get together again. i have very few friends, and even fewer with whom i'm currently living in the same county. wait, whose fault is that? i forget.

j. in the spirit of making honesty my best policy, i think from now on whenever people ask me what i'm doing with myself these days, i'm just going to admit that i spend my time sitting on my ass and wasting my potential.

k. YAY AUSTRALIAN OPEN. i would be even happier about it if i could, you know, watch the matches, but there's no cable in this house; also no best-friend-slash-roommate around to give me carte blanche to sprawl on her bed and watch tennis on her television into the small hours. *dejected*

i was pleased as punch when i heard a couple of months ago that martina hingis was definitely going to rejoin the tour, and i was very glad to see she's handily won her first two matches. she was a bitch, but i loved watching her play; john mcenroe always likened her to a chess player, and that's infinitely more interesting than maria sharapova banging flat, heavy groundstrokes off both sides point after point. see also: andy roddick. the papers kept talking about how geared up andy roddick was for this year, and i was all, who CARES, omg who CARES about andy roddick? okay, i'm sure the boy has fans. also a mother who loves him.

l. i've adopted the exclamation, "oh, bitchcakes" (TM neil gaiman). it trips so lightly off the tongue!

m. silentfire has intersession starting next week, and i'm trying very hard to get up to boston to visit. current plans have me coming in next friday; new classes start for her on the following wednesday, but it's new semester stuff, and possibly i can attend them WITH her and we can dork out together, \m/. also it might be the perfect time to visit my uncle et al. up there, who have been badgering me to come visit for years now. i should call them. i should do LOTS of things.

n. my parents have gone up to mt. dora (a small, quaint (so i hear) town in central florida) with another couple for the weekend, to do some antiquing, no really. that will always mean celestial navigation to me. i have nothing planned in the meantime, except perhaps cousin m. will want to watch the last disc of boomtown tonight or tomorrow. there's talk of a sketching circle meeting at barnie's on sunday, and even if that falls through, malelia_honu scored tickets for whoever's at the improv this sunday night. right now, i have to get out of the house.

o. end of ze world, as told by funny accents and flash animation.

a. in the absence of an actual job, my dad has proposed that he give me money for essentially acting as his secretary. he has ten years of piles of paper—bills, building plans, receipts, annual reports, business cards—and his least favorite chore in the world is sorting through and organizing it all. the paper trail has spilled over into at least four rooms in this house, and his attempt to consolidate it all into one room has been half-hearted at best and unsuccessful at worst. so, in exchange for setting up a filing system—and if you could see my hard drive, you would know how much i adore folders within folders—and paying the household bills, i am taking the money and running.

b. year 22, month 9, day 11 (toby: there was that time i was in elementary school) of career search: STILL NO PLAN. my mother actually asked the other day where i saw myself in five or ten years, and i didn't laugh in her face OR burst into tears, but i did have to quickly leave the room. honestly? i'm peter from office space. given the choice, i would do nothing.

c. gjstruthseeker would like for me to roadtrip it up to gainesville this week, and i would like to go. the lack of a car puts a little crimp in this plan, but i'm going to see what i can do. i hear the weather is lovely this time of year!

d. speaking of lovely weather in places that aren't south florida: who would like a scarf? if you would like one, i would love to make you one. for testimonials i suppose you can refer to gjstruthseeker, zeplum, vongroovy, silentfire, or malelia_honu, all of whom got scarves last year that (they said) they liked. i owe isilya, but she's told me to hold off on sending anything until her living arrangements are settled (at which point she will apparently need plenty of warm-weather gear and accessories, as she has mentioned there may be things like chilblains in her future o.O); i just finished another one for mal and am about to start a new one for erika, but other than that i have no commissions and i'm in the mood. so let me know.

e. on saturday my dad woke me up at about one in the afternoon to ask if i was interested in going to an art fair. we ended up spending a couple of hours in the late afternoon at art in the park in the city of plantation, which turned out to be the perfect amount of time. it's a relatively small park and a correspondingly small fair, so we got to see just about everything, but without that eventual glazed and impenetrable feeling of supersaturation that always hits me at the end of a day at the museum or a bigger festival like coconut grove. my dad bought me two prints and an arepa.

f. lists are my new favorite thing. honestly, i don't remember how to write a livejournal entry anymore.

g. malelia_honu and i finally got to see ( RENT ) we went late on a wednesday night and were the only people in the theater. go us.

h. the other day cimorene111 posted a glowing rec for christmastime in the city, a CSI:NY story (mac/danny) by stellaluna_, and i thought to myself, "score!" because i once saw an episode of CSI:NY, and that's all the qualification i need these days to feel myself up to the task of reading in any given fandom. lacking that, a primer will suffice—pictures are a bonus, but not strictly required. so i read this story, and it was fantastic, and then i followed the link back to her fanfic100 table and read all of the stories she had listed there; and THEN i settled down in earnest with her webspace and her livejournal memories and burned through her entire oeuvre. i ended with the light from a dying star series, which is this dark and drowning work of beauty that feels like taking a bat to a windshield, because they keep breaking and breaking, but they never shatter.

i. saturday night cousin m. and i ate more sushi and worked our way through disc 3 of boomtown. the more i see of this show the more i fall in love, and the sadder i am that this single season is all we'll ever have. this is a show that cared deeply about continuity and quality, that expected a lot of its audience, and then rewarded them. the A, B, C, D, and E plots all interconnect and serve a purpose—a unified purpose. everything works in support of the plot and themes of the episode and futher character development; everything they do reinforces what we've seen and then tells us something new.

on the how-much-do-we-know-about-our-crimefighters? spectrum, boomtown falls a lot closer to NYPD blue than law & order, but everything's a slow reveal. they definitely control the narrative. and i like these people. they're good people. ( cutting for, um, spoilers? because somebody someday might watch this show )

j. i don't talk much about NCIS, but i love it. it's got great banter and the adorably grumpy mark harmon. actually i like all the characters, even zeva; i'm not crazy about the director, but i am pretty crazy about abby and ducky, and even tony in his own smarmy, approval-seeking way. i don't talk about it much because half the time i forget to watch it, and i'm not particularly fannish about it—though i did read all the recs from the last polyamorous update.

k. catch-up: i'm two weeks behind on house, but i do have them on tape; i'm *three* weeks behind on SGA, but gjstruthseeker sent me "epiphany" and "critical mass" in the mail, and i'm downloading "grace under pressure" piecemeal from oxoniensis right now, so one day i won't have to press my sad little nose up against the glass and stare longingly at everyone's freaking cut tags anymore.

l. ( grey's anatomy )

m. if there's anyone within lj-shot who hasn't downloaded both rumble by shalott and cesperanza and welcome home by permetaform, for the love of god, please do that right now. no passing go, no two hundred dollars, etc. the first is HILARIOUS, seriously, seriously hilarious. ( i'm going to call these spoilers, because it's just so much better if you don't know what it's about until it's happening ) and permetaform's vid is this gorgeous look at elizabeth and atlantis set to this equally unbelievably gorgeous music, and i keep abusing adjectives, but it's BEAUTIFUL and the story it tells is amazing.

n. site-src: museum of media history: in the year 2014, the new york times has gone offline. the fourth estate's fortunes have waned. what happened to the news? and what is EPIC?

o. next time: ALL THE WAY THROUGH THE ALPHABET. *facepalm*

a. the other day—one of those days when there was no power and i went wandering around the house pining for just one rumor on any internet—i had this horrible idea for a livejournal community: a character manifesto community, along the lines of ship_manifesto. it was inspired by the fact that i adore lt. col. john sheppard of the cheesy show stargate: atlantis beyond all reason and, likely, all rational thought; and yet there are many people who either 1) are perfectly ambivalent toward him, or 2) hate him, everything he does, and everything he stands for. and not only would i love to spread the gospel of john sheppard in a forum that forces me to use examples and reasoning and sentences that don't include the symbols "<" and "3" and "!" repeatedly in conjunction with each other; i would love to read through somebody else's evidence stack for all their grievances against him.

likewise for someone like elizabeth, whom i hate: the urge to smash her face in every time she opens her mouth grows stronger with every episode, and i suppose i could marshal my arguments and articulate all the things she does that are patronizing and ineffectual and STUPID—but i also know there are people out there who are elizabeth FANS, and i ask, "dear god, WHY?" in all seriousness. i would like to know what they see.

please now tell me all the reasons why we should never speak of this again.

b. dear gjstruthseeker and silentfire,

thanks to malelia_honu's faithful listening habits, she was able to tell me—and i am able to tell you—to listen to this week's broadcast of wait, wait . . . don't tell me!, specifically the listener limerick challenge segment beginning at 10:57. you will be rewarded! or possibly you will suffer post-traumatic flashbacks! but nobody likes to suffer alone.

c. on friday malelia_honu and i ventured out into the world to see ( prime )

on the way out of the theater we made frustrated motions at the starbucks next door that was just closing up for the night. i don't understand why cafés and coffee bars that are located very close to movie theaters don't make it a point to be open for at least an hour after the last movie is over. mal and i don't even like starbucks coffee, but they were right there, and we would have paid good money for their brewed or baked goods and then sat in their establishment for an hour or so, playing cards or talking about the movie or whatever. don't people do that? instead, nobody got our business, and we came back to my house and played a rousing game of scrabble!

d. yesterday my parents went driving up and down the turnpike all day to attend first the services and then the party for the bat mitzvah of a cousin on my dad's side. "have fun!" i said. i wasn't even invited, but i was more relieved than miffed—these aren't the nice cousins. i went over to cousin m.'s house to watch an episode of boomtown and play with the kittens; then we went downtown for thai food; and then we came back and watched the next three episodes and played with the kittens some more. cousin m. slept through the middle of episode three, but she thinks i didn't notice, so that's okay.

boomtown was a television show that premiered in 2002: nobody watched it; NBC beat it into the ground with sad scheduling and eventually cancelled it early in its second season. i can see why. not because it's a bad show—dozens of bad shows are renewed every year, i haven't figured out why—and not just because it was a really, really good show (which it was), because evidence has shown that really good shows can achieve critical acclaim and popular support, though not as often as one could hope.

its downfall was that it makes you WORK. my parents asked me what it was about, and i thought for a minute before telling them it was centered around crime, because it's not exactly a crime drama, or a legal drama, or a medical and emergency-rescue drama—but it's centered around a crime, and in the course of an episode we get the story of that crime from the points of view of all the regular characters, plus the relevant players that week, e.g. the perpetrators or victims or the relatives and accomplices thereof. the regular characters include two police officers, two detectives (one of whom is played by donnie wahlberg, and i wish i were more fluently versed in pop culture so i could fully appreciate just how funny i suspect that is), a deputy district attorney, a reporter, and a paramedic. their lives are all intertwined, and they all have their own problems, which are revealed slowly and not necessarily chronologically. it's not the kind of show you can put on while you're doing your homework or the dishes, and it's not the kind of show you can pick up mid-season; it's not even the kind of show you can miss an episode or two of without getting completely lost. i think if you missed the pilot, it was already too late. it was an intricately thought-out and beautifully put-together show, and i am completely unsurprised that it didn't make it on weekly network television. it did last a full season though, so at least we have that.

e. the library called on friday to tell me i had items ready for pick-up! which i then dutifully trotted over and picked up. one of the items was the complete first series of the office. we watched the first episode during dinner, and i don't know yet if i'm more amused than horrified or vice-versa. there are more items for the picking-up tomorrow, so i ought to at least get started on paul erdős's biography. cousin m. loaned me her complete chronicles of narnia, and i mean to re-read the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe before the movie comes out; and my mom just handed me the no. 1 ladies' detective agency, which the plain dealer called "one of the best, most charming, honest, hilarious and life-affirming books to appear in years," and my mother thought it was decent, so that's on the pile too.

f. my mom and i went grocery shopping today, and in the produce section by the orange juice we ran into an old family friend, a woman who worked with my mom and whose oldest daughter is my age, though we were never terribly good friends. her youngest daughter (a junior in high school) is apparently having trouble keeping her grades up; the mom asked, not exactly seriously, i don't think, if i tutored: "AP statistics," she asked? and i said i never took statistics, that was the one thing i couldn't help with; but pre-calc i could probably do, and when she asked about "AP english with a wacky teacher?" i said, "AHAHAHA, AP ENGLISH WITH A WACKY TEACHER IS MY SPECIALTY." the caps-lock was mostly in my head. mostly.

that, of course, spurred my mother to later broach the topic of grad school and whether i'd been doing any thinking about it, a conversation from which i had to run away and hide.

g. ( grey's anatomy )

h. be honest: how many of you filled out jason's nerd search?

a. oh man, this is so late, but: a happy and healthy new year to everyone celebrating the new year! in my house we cooked all day for company (only cousin m. and my aunt and uncle this year) for dinner on both nights of rosh hashanah; my aunt had break fast and did it strangely, as we all knew she would but always hope she won't.

my mom and i sat out synagogue this year: she was deeply unhappy with the rabbi and cantor at our old temple and left several years ago; she has yet to find another one that makes her feel satisfied and welcome. my dad tried to guilt me into going with him, but it didn't take. instead i did some navel-gazing of the "i have basically rejected the religion of my childhood, yet at the same time would like not to reject the culture outright or the family traditions entailed therein" variety. ( you know, like you do. )

b. went with cousin m. to the humane society on two separate occasions this past week to pick out cats for her to take home and love forever and ever. it's a good thing i was expressly forbidden to bring home any kittens myself, because KITTENS. cousin m. took a whole lot longer than i would have to make up her mind, but in the end came away with littermates: two male grey tiger kittens, two months old, who are friendly and playful and curious and, you know, adorable. she picked them up yesterday and took today off from work to make sure they wouldn't get lost in her house or anything. she referred to it as maternity leave.

c. the other day my mom asked me about things like application deadlines and whether i really wanted to go to grad school, etc.: it's not her fault that career talk + pms = a one-way ticket to crying jag town.

i've reluctantly agreed that there's no real point in going to grad school if i don't really know what i want to do. i am so, so tempted to write to my cambridge shakespeare professor and ask him if he was really serious when he said he wished i were his student and suggested i consider cambridge for graduate school, or if he was just toying with my fragile emotions. because it was obviously something i was good at and would probably enjoy doing. it would be something to do: reading for a graduate degree in shakespeare. in cambridge. i would explode, you know?

also there is the part where i want a ph.d. JUST BECAUSE. the other day i couldn't figure out how to properly abbreviate and capitalize Ph.D.:

walkingshadow: . . . this probably means i don't deserve one, doesn't it?
silentfire: i'd give you one if you wrote me fic
silentfire: it'd be a Ph.D. in AWESOME

d. my parents keep pushing my to edit the blog i kept in england for the purposes of paper publishing, and have redoubled their efforts since i've been home. i updated almost every day, often more than once a day: the sucker as it stands is 46,611 words. i'm thinking about it; i have absolutely no idea how it would work.

here's the thing: november is national novel-writing month. at the moment i have nothing more to say. i probably won't ever have anything more to say, but i give it a long look every year.

e. cousin m. and i had our last bellydancing class not last thursday but the thursday before, and i am not that sad to see it go. it was fun to do, but ultimately frustrating and unsatisfying: the instructor was a very nice lady and a fine dancer, but a nervous person and a horrible teacher. on the other hand, we've since had our first tai chi lesson and we love both it and the instructor. i'm sure that to call it chinese yoga is reductive and offensive to both the disciplines and their respective cultures of origin, but the similarities kept piling up in my head as he mentioned five principles in our first lesson: relaxation; keeping a straight back; breathing; twisting at the waist; and the circling of the hands. i don't know if he's making up his own list or what, but i can get behind it. also the massaging of the internal organs. class is held in a high-school cafeteria: i have to remember to bundle up for next tuesday. i.e. tomorrow.

f. my music purge is complete. the casualty rate was 13.5% (721 of 5,314), though i've added 250 songs just since i've been home from school. one of them was burn, baby, burn by the residents; you can download it there from fluxblog. i like to think of it as judges 11:30-40 (the god digs my daddy remix): jephthah made a vow that if god delivered his (jephthah's) enemies in battle, he would sacrifice the first person who came out of his house to meet him. fast forward to jephthah returning home from victory, when who should rush out to greet him but his daughter, his only child. and he was sad about it, you know, but a promise is a promise. the song is sung from the point of view of the daughter, about to die. it's creepy and cracktastic and i can't stop listening to it, but it's interesting, because the blame falls on god, when it seems like the fault is pretty clearly with the human element in this one.

g. television roundup:

kitchen confidential. i don't remember what i had to say about this one. maybe just that i still love it and am sad it's on hiatus. there's a fic community at greg_the_fish if you're interested in reading or writing. please be interested in writing, oh please.

( grey's anatomy )

( the west wing )

( related )

h. my dad and i saw ( wallace and gromit )

and on saturday malelia_honu and i saw ( proof )

after the movie we went on a wild-goose chase looking for csi: miami dvds at first blockbuster and then (reluctantly) at wal-mart, but they were nowhere to be found; at least not at one a.m. it's just that ( what's one more spoiler-cut between friends? ) i didn't get in on the ground floor of any of the csis, i'm just going to have to start renting from the beginning. other shows i mean to get in on include arrested development and scrubs (saw the first season and nothing after); along with anything else you all think is worthwhile. my kingdom for a netflix subscription?

i. is for icon meme:

take a look at my icons. comment with the following:

1. one that makes you automatically think of me.
2. one that you think i should TOTALLY use more often.
3. one that you don't get/needs more explanation/you have no idea why the hell i have it.

comment using an icon of yours that you LOVE, and tell me why you picked THAT one too.