walkingshadow: nihilistic thumbs up!! (sga: with a TOOTHBRUSH)
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: [livejournal.com profile] 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.
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 )

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