the best imitation of myself

My luggage has finally caught up to me! It only took three days! I'm going to pretend that I traveled via wormhole instead of jet plane so I can blame time dilation, because that's so much cooler and less ragey than human apathy and incompetence.

And now, we meme:

Name a fandom or a fannish topic and I will share my unpopular fandom opinions on the matter. Or any opinion, because I have lots of those and don't always know which ones are unpopular or not.

Unpopular fandom opinions, ahoy! Here, I'll start: Patrick Stump? Totally overrated! THERE, I SAID IT. Okay, now you go.

real updates still pending, so in the meantime: guess the songs from the lyrics! a.k.a. the most awesome meme on the planet, etc., etc., i love it so much. okay, go! go!

01. and when you're next to me i can feel your heartbeat through my skin silentfire: what do i have to do by stabbing westward
02. all five horizons revolved around her soul dsudis: alive by pearl jam
03. i'm pushing chemicals all rushing through my bloodstream dsudis: babylon by david gray
04. she is trapped inside a month of gray silentfire: mercury by counting crows
05. i broke into your house last night gjstruthseeker: spitting games by snow patrol
06. a bullet through the brain make him feel different today silentfire: help myself by dave matthews band
07. lend me your ears and i'll sing you a song gjstruthseeker: with a little help from my friends by the beatles
08. there are guards at the on-ramps armed to the teeth dsudis: this place is a prison by the postal service
09. can't write a love song worth shit iamsab: dragon ships by fruit bats
10. the sea meets delight in his saltwater eyes: ocean night song by laura veirs
11. looked like mr. natural, the kind you would take home: pick up lines by the dance hall crashers
12. it's fate my life has brought me here today: silentfire: angel pumping gas by lindsey pool
13. one thing i've found is that nothing, nothing makes a difference: signs & symbols by the archivist
14. the colors of the rainbow are so pretty in the skies gjstruthseeker: what a wonderful world [covered] by joey ramone
15. can i take you to a restaurant that's got glass tables meinnim: mirror in the bathroom by the english beat
16. like painted kites those days and nights went flying by: summer wind [covered] by madeleine peyroux
17. the wise man's tools are analogies and puzzles: remind me by royksopp
18. we would smoke and drink and laugh and sing of foreign things: young sensualists by throw me the statue
19. i have come here to destroy everything that you have held dear: i'm no lover by antarctica takes it!
20. preserve your memories, they're all that's left you iamsab: old friends/bookends by simon & garfunkel

( answers to leksa's questions )

if anybody else has questions, ask away.

a. right, went to atlanta last weekend with my dad: on saturday we scoped out a scrimmage for the kids' robotics competition and had italian food in celebration of c.'s birthday; the new georgia aquarium* was (unsurprisingly) jam-packed on the sunday of a holiday weekend; fernbank still has awesome dinosaur skeletons in the rotunda and a kick-ass children's section upstairs; and we watched 4940352 hours of olympics coverage in high definition. i do not need to see bob costas that clearly. also most sports commentators should not so much commentate as shut up.

b. now is still a good time to request songs and icons!

c. i have to write a 10,000-word lj entry in four days omg. and by "have to" i mean "i brought this down upon myself" and "what kind of influence was i UNDER anyway?"

d. last night instead of writing 10,000 words on anything, i was filling in sudoku puzzles compulsively.

e. also i was listening to starship's "nothing's gonna stop us now" on repeat. i know there are people in this world who don't like starship—who, in fact, think starship is one of the worst bands ever to record a hit song in the 1980s, and those people are DEAD TO ME kthx.

f. ALSO last night my hair looked FABULOUS. (my hair looks best when i wash it, like, once a week, which is about how often i'm getting out of the house these days, so that works out.) malelia_honu and i met for coffee and milkshakes and cards in dunkin' donuts, then we took a trip to borders, and then we drove along the beach for a while listening to RENT.

g. i feel like i have a thousand things to do, but i don't really—unless you count tagging all the fic on my hard drive into my del.icio.us account, or making criminal minds icons, or writing up a giant NCIS pimp post of doom (it's coming, mwahahaha), or writing a 10,000-word lj post, just for the hell of it—which i don't, particularly. and all the big things that i should be doing i just keep shunting into my blind spot and avoiding like the plague. basically i have no money and no prospects and no direction and no motivation (except—see: "no money") and i'm starting to wonder what's so wrong with staying in bed all day anyway?

ETA: silentfire texted me to say, "so i was thinking, and i decided that you should get a job up here in boston" and she is so right.

h. like everyone else on the internets i took the quick and painless enneagram test. i am a five (the observer: "i need to understand the world") and yes, it is a direct pipeline to my soul, but its html is horrifying, so here are some highlights:

how to get along with me: remember that if i seem aloof, distant, or arrogant, it may be that i am feeling uncomfortable; help me to avoid my pet peeves: big parties, other people's loud music, overdone emotions, and intrusions on my privacy.

what i like about being a five: coming to a thorough understanding—perceiving causes and effects; not being caught up in material possessions and status.

what's hard about being a five: feeling bad when I act defensive or like a know-it-all; watching others with better social skills, but less intelligence or technical skill, do better professionally.

fives as children often: spend a lot of time alone reading, making collections, and so on; have a few special friends rather than many (for me this is true now more than ever); are very bright and curious and do well in school.

i. someone ought to drop language log a line and suggest that gray text on a white background isn't the easiest combination on the eyes, but man are they fun to read. yesterday they nominated this something positive cartoon for a trent reznor prize for tricky embedding. in it they linked to a fascinating post on writing style and dementia, in which mark liberman commented that "geoff pullum will be happy to learn that strunk and white's stylistic advice may actually rot the brain." and then i spent a happy hour reading through the language log archives for all the times geoff pullum has whaled on the elements of style—here are some of my favorites!

j. all or most of the above was written sometime before i went to bed at six or seven a.m. this morning, but obviously not posted. today i woke up at around one-thirty, had breakfast at three, and puttered around until my mom got home at around four-thirty. we started drinking white wine and eating bruschetta at five, ordered italian food at five-thirty, and my dad brought it home at a little after six, or maybe six-thirty, at which time we switched to red wine and continued with season five gilmore girls on DVD. luke and lorelai are the cutest EVER and i just want those crazy kids to work it OUT. you guys. i've had, like, five glasses of wine, and that's the perfect time to start finishing up my rec50 recs, right? right. right.


* frankly i was BORED at the georgia aquarium. the fish were cool—the jellyfish were the COOLEST—but we were ten people in our party and my pace was a lot faster than most of them, meaning i spent a lot of time standing and waiting for everyone else while surrounded by mobs of people. plus we found the exhibits curiously short on information. when i'm looking at the tanks and asking "but what ARE they, where do they live, what do they eat, why do they look like that?" you're not volunteering enough. i did discover that sea otters (who, by the way, seem to have just as much fun as we think they do) have hair on every part of their body but their front paws, which they hold out of the water to keep warm. also they use tools! luckily, silentfire was reading about the dull thoughts of dead white men in a boston coffee shop and was available to text me with ideas of gibbs and tony making out in the aquarium's dark and blue-tinged recesses. \o/

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.

The cat and dog fight like—well, you know. Turns out it's not just a figure of speech.

Together malelia_honu and I blew off yoga on Tuesday and instead went shopping at Old Navy, where we each bought several items at wildly discounted prices. I watched House after dinner. ( reactions to Cursed )

I read Dira Sudis's Last Rites a while ago, but I just went back to it for a re-read now that things make more sense. You couldn't ask for a better follow-up to this episode.

And then I finished Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem. It's just what it says, the history of Fermat's Last Theorem and why (and how) it took 350 years to solve. They yadda-yadda-yaddad over most of the actual math, especially toward the end (which I can't help feeling a little put-out about, no matter that I wouldn't even begin to understand it), but it's a good story. In some ways it's a horrifying story: the lives of so many mathematicians seem tenuous at best and the tragedy of time is everywhere in abundant evidence. They often died young, or lived in turbulent times, or lived at the wrong time. Wiles himself finally expressed, explicitly, the danger of a linear, unidirectional timeline:

Having tried every tool and technique in the published literature, [Wiles] had found that they were all inadequate. "I really believed that I was on the right track, but that did not mean that I would necessarily reach my goal. It could be that the methods needed to solve this particular problem may simply be beyond present-day mathematics. Perhaps the methods I needed to complete the proof would not be invented for a hundred years. So even if I was on the right track, I could be living in the wrong century." (237)

Isn't that terrifying? The odds of achieving self-actualization are infinitesimal in this world. Galois was a "respectable but not outstanding" student until he encountered mathematics at the age of sixteen; he was twice refused admittance to the École Polytechnique because of the "abruptness and lack of explanation in the oral examination"; he was caught up in the tumultuous politics of 1820s and '30s France and died in a duel at the age of twenty. Leonhard Euler's father was determined that his son should pursue a career in the Church—and he did, until their friends the Bernoullis intervened and persuaded the father that his son "had been born to calculate, not to preach."

What's so haunting isn't that Euler almost became a clergyman to fulfill his father's wishes instead of a mathematician who would later be referred to as "analysis incarnate" and of whom "the French academician François Arago said, 'Euler calculated without apparent effort as men breathe, or as eagles sustain themselves in the wind'"—but that for every touch-and-go story like his that ends happily, there must be countless other stories that end with the hapless protagonist going into his father's business without a word of complaint; or dying in infancy; or being too poor for school or books; or being born into a nomadic tribe, or before the advent of Pythagoras and the entire field of mathematics. The tragedy of time is that in the fifteenth century Leonardo da Vinci was able to design a helicopter that would have flown—what could he have done today? That kind of thing can keep me up at night.

( More snippets from the book. )

That was all Tuesday; today was Wednesday, but I didn't do much with it. My mother and I ran errands, we made our own version of these shrimp pouches for dinner, and we started the seventh season of M*A*S*H*: BJ's moustache is truly hideous, but his initials stand for anything you want!

And if you're still here, leave a one-word comment that you think best describes me. It can only be one word. No more. Then copy & paste this in your journal so that I may leave a word about you.

I slept till 2:30 this afternoon, almost twelve hours after I'd gone to bed. Today I did not make any appointments, pay any bills, read any books, or go to the gym. I've been awake since 2:30 this afternoon, but I haven't done anything with it. I put on a bra and flip-flops, but I'm still wearing what I wore to bed last night.

I've been wandering around the house with Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler tucked under my arm, but I'm only two pages in. The introduction was boring and long-winded and highbrow, but I had to read it. Or at least start to read it—I eventually skimmed to the end and skipped over entirely the select bibliography and the chronology. If I like the book, then I'll care. I have lost anything resembling an attention span.

In the meantime, let's meme:

There's been an accident and my memory's been wiped. I have no recollection of who I am. Tell me about myself: What do you know about me? What kind of person am I? What are my likes and dislikes? How did we meet and how long have we known each other? Is there one thing in particular that stands out about me? Tell me who I am. Tell me anything.

meinnim tagged me for ( the movie meme. )

malelia_honu and I had a lovely day on Tuesday, thank you Palm Beach County. My dad warned us on the way out about THUNDERSTORMS PREDICTED IN THE AREA, we should be very, very careful and perhaps not linger in Palm Beach County, what with the major thunderstorms, but we managed to make it out the door, agreeing to keep our distance on the wet roads and, like, turn the windshield wipers on. We had blazing sun all day. But I'm getting ahead of the narrative.

It's not a very complicated narrative, but we had fun doing it. Mal picked me up a little after eleven, and our first stop was breakfast at Panera where we ate bread mmmm and mocked young businesspeople for their cellphone usage. From there we drove up to the Morikami, a museum and gardens left by one of a group of Japanese settlers who arrived in the area in the early part of the century. We walked the path around the lake, taking pictures of the flowers and the bamboo and the insects and each other, walking in the shade whenever we could and ducking under shelters when we found them. It was very hot. Our pictures attest to the perfect blueness of the sky but fail to convey the heat. We made it most of the way around the lake and to the Yamato-kan that housed the museum, padding around the stuffy rooms in our paper slippers and sweltering in the warm air the fans blew around. We lost the will to live then. There are no pictures of the rest of the walk back, and once we got into the air conditioning we sat ourselves down in the back of their auditorium and watched the sadly-outdated twelve-minute video of what the Morikami has to offer.

Once we'd gotten some energy back we toured the gallery exhibits. There was some folk art, but the best part was the origiami figures of endangered Florida species: butterflies, birds, a panther's face, an alligator, a snake made from a single sheet of paper, nine feet long. Other animals, all gorgeous. They think there are maybe fifty adult Florida panthers left in the wild.

It was time for ice cream then. Mal's boyfriend R. lives about twenty minutes up the road, and on the way to his house we stopped at Publix and picked up some Ben & Jerry's. Once there, we ate it over a viewing of Empire Records, finishing about when he came home from work. Empire Records! Oh, that movie. I think of it every time I say "orange" and I love Lucas even more than I remembered. "Who knows where thoughts come from? They just appear!"

For dinner they took me out for sushi, and what faaabulous sushi it was. R. was overjoyed Mal had brought along a non-vegetarian with whom he could explore the menu, and I was happy to experiment. We decided we could put away five rolls between the two of us, and we did, though they came after the salad with the yummy ginger dressing and before the green-tea ice cream, and I practically rolled myself out, stuffed and content. Back at the house we looked at our pictures from the day, comparing and culling, and then we all played a rousing game of Rummy-500. We are wild and crazy, it's so true. R. called it quits a few rounds in and went off to bed; Mal and I played a little more and polished off the Ben & Jerry's from earlier before I said goodnight and it was lovely to meet you and we headed back south.

We'd had grand plans of playing more cards and maybe watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail at my place, but it was 12:30 by the time we pulled up, and Mal had things to do in the morning. I stayed up for a while but was too tired to do much, even to post. I went to bed at three-thirty or so and slept until after one this afternoon.

And how do you follow up a day of camaraderie and activity but by doing nothing around the house all day? That's what I thought. There's a little more space on my floor, but I mostly just shuffled things around. My mom and I made dinner and we watched House afterward over ears of corn. I'd say spoilery things about it, but other people already have, and I'm probably just talking to myself anyway. I loved it though, I thought it was done incredibly well and revealed quite a lot, for both the canon and the characters. I'm looking forward to catching it in summer reruns. When I get tired of waiting around for those, I'll be scouring for episode guides at tvtome.com. Plus I'll be looking for the fic. It's not that I'm always in the market for new fandoms, but they follow me home and how can I turn them away?