walkingshadow: nihilistic thumbs up!! (the future freaks me out)
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 [livejournal.com profile] 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 [livejournal.com profile] 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.
walkingshadow: nihilistic thumbs up!! (Default)
I finished The Liar on Saturday, and I think I promised [livejournal.com profile] go4it I would tell her what I thought of it, oh so many moons ago. I . . . liked it. I think. Or rather, I'm not sure. Maybe? It took a little while for me to sort out what was happening, so the beginning was a little trying for my patience, but I liked the middle, the middle clicked along and was highly entertaining; it felt like the book kept ending, but unnecessarily so, like it couldn't figure out how to stop. The revelation that it was all just a game struck me as a lot sadder than I think it struck Adrian. And yet I like how it ended up finally. It would profit hugely from a second read-through I'm sure. Right now I've started Edward Conlon's Blue Blood, this massive tome about life as a New York City police officer, and it's fantastic. I'm only forty-five pages into it or something, but this one I'm already recommending.

Saturday night my parents and I went out for Indian food and then came home to break in the Second Season West Wing DVDs. This is where I declare my undying love and devotion for "In the Shadow of Two Gunmen", two of the best hours of television ever written and performed. As I just told [livejournal.com profile] silentfire, one of my favorite scenes (aside from Leo telling Jed, "this is the age of Jed Bartlett, my friend. You're going to open your mouth and lift houses off the ground. Whole houses, right off the ground"; and Toby finding Josh sitting on the ground with his hands pressed to his chest; and that scene in the airport that makes me cry, followed by the scene in Josh's hospital room that makes me cry more) is when Margaret tells Leo that she can sign the President's name.

Leo: You can sign the President's name?
Margaret: Yeah.
Leo: On a document removing him from power and handing it to someone else?
Margaret: Yeah! Or . . . do you think the White House Counsel would say that was a bad idea?
Leo: I think the White House Counsel would say it was a coup d'état!
Margaret: Well. I'd probably end up doing some time for that.
Leo: I would think! And what the hell were you doing practicing the President's signature?
Margaret: It was just for fun!
Leo: We've got separation of powers, checks and balances, and Margaret, vetoing things and sending them back to the Hill.

My mother and I LAUGHED and LAUGHED, waking up my father who had, of course, already fallen asleep in his chair. We made it through "The Midterms" before my parents called it quits and took themselves off to bed, but I stuck around for the last four episodes of Firefly.

This isn't like reluctantly turning the last page of an engrossing and exciting novel and thinking but I want to know what happens next. This is like turning the last page of the first volume of an engrossing and exciting twenty-seven volumes, only to learn that not only do the other twenty-six volumes not exist, but somebody ripped the last fifty pages out of Volume I to boot. The reaction to this one is where's the rest of it, you fuckers?! and you use double punctuation when you say it. When does Serenity hit theaters?

I did three loads of laundry on Sunday, boom boom boom, and left shirts and skirts and a pair of pants hanging all over the laundry room while we went to dinner at cousin M.'s for her birthday. As a birthday present my mother taught her how to make her super-secret family recipe (*cough*) barbecue spareribs—talk about a present everyone can enjoy. We drank champagne on her backyard patio before sitting down, and I met my mother at the sliding-glass door when I told everyone to come in. "Mmm," I said, "nothing like champagne on an empty stomach." And she said, "I know, it's such a nice buzz, isn't it? I can say things like that to you now, right?" My mother is adorable. (Today she mentioned she sometimes tries to put the cat on the dog's back, like to give him a ride, but one of them always runs away, and I cracked up.) We left relatively early but it was a school night and my mother went to bed early; I stayed up reading fic until five-thirty.

And today! Today I have done nothing! I pretended to unpack some boxes and I helped set my mother up with the first day of a light weight-training regimen, and I darted out for a five-minute milk run (literally—we needed a gallon of milk for the ziti with quattro formaggi and I drove up to the Farm Stores on 46th).

There's nothing like your father turning to you and asking—as you sit with your parents after dinner watching last week's House, M.D.—"what's a dominatrix?" Luckily I'd seen the show when it aired originally and knew they'd soon explain it, succinctly if not in full. I love House. Don't you just want to take him home with you? In lieu of that, I'll settle for knowing where all the House/Wilson fic is. My mother, who hadn't seen an episode until tonight, wanted to know if they lived together. I think fandom would say she's not wrong.

Tomorrow [livejournal.com profile] malelia_honu is coming around and collecting me for a day of romping around Palm Beach County, so I'll make tonight an early one. Relatively speaking.

October 2021

S M T W T F S
     12
345 6789
10111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930
31      

Most Popular Tags

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags