through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered . . .

Item One: You are never too old to shuffle your feet through a drift of leaves to see how far you can elongate it by kicking them along. Ever. This is my favorite part of the whole foliage thing in the fall. Just make sure it's a wind drift, not someone's careful raking.

Item Two: VOTING. I am covered with stickers! I love voting. Um, not just because of the stickers. But the stickers don't hurt. On campus today, they were passing out "I Voted No on 1!" stickers to people who had, you know, voted No on 1. (Question One was an attempt to repeal the law Governor Baldacci signed in May allowing gay marriage. I have not discussed this issue in my journal because FLAMES ON THE SIDE OF MY FACE, but it's been a pretty big deal. Tons of campaigning on both sides.) But anyway, I love voting even on off-years, and haven't missed an Election Day since I turned eighteen. I keep the stickers and each year and stick them on my headboard, because I am a dork.

Addendum to Item Two: I did not know that there was no voting going on in California! So, obviously, my post of admonishment to non-voters does not apply to any Californians on the flist.

Item Three: My Oscar Wilde professor is awesome. We had our midterm last Thursday, and I completely mismanaged my time, as is my wont, and only finished three of the four questions we had to do. Well, he came to me after class and said I was the only one who hadn't at least gotten a start on a fourth question, and he didn't want to have to give me a shite grade (that is a paraphrasing) that doesn't reflect my actual ability in the class, and when I explained that I have ADD and it distorts my sense of time (which is every inch the truth, you non-ADDers have NO idea), he said yeah he thought it was something like that, and it allows him to give me another fifteen minutes to try and complete a fourth answer. So! Shan't flunk the midterm in one of the classes I'm learning the most from this semester after all!

Item Four: Had a bunch of time during srsly boring discussion of unending Irish poetry (I suck so much at reading poetry; my interpretation of things tends to be way too literal for like ninety-five percent of poems to make anything resembling sense in my brain) to work on a sort of experimental Evita fic I've had percolating for a few days. So that was a much better use of those two and a half hours.

Item Five: Today wins.

Today I got to use the term "temporal displacement" in a Sociology assignment. It was in a discussion of an article about how working for a twenty-four-hour resort can really fuck up the schedule a person lives on, putting them out of sync with most of the world.

Can't say that I ever expected being a Doctor Who fan to come in handy for Sociology.

I just finished reading The Picture of Dorian Gray for my British Literature class, which is specifically about Oscar Wilde and the fin de siécle. (It's entirely possible that I've said so before, but I seriously don't expect you to remember.) This would be pretty awesome anyway, since it's such a fun book, but it's like a reward after having slogged through (most of) Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as blah blah blah. And yes, I have had a hard time keeping the titles separate in my head.

So anyway, I went to Google it once I was done, and I have this great plug-in in my Firefox that grins up the Wikipedia article for anything I Google. (Googlepedia, if you're interested. God, I'm parenthetical today.) One of the fun things about Wikipedia is that you can judge by the various notations just how psychotically anal the people who take interest in that particular subject are.

Fans of aesthetic literature do not, as it turns out, disappoint.



Attribution needed? Really? How about every single person who has ever read the fucking book? Because I'm not sure how that aspect of that competition could have been LESS obvious.

One of the essays I've been assigned to read along with the book is titled "Homosexual Desire and the Effacement of the Self in The Picture of Dorian Gray." As a slasher, I find this hilarious. I'm pretty confident that it won't teach me anything new about gay subtext (or, in this case, gay text, because DAMN) and the implications thereof. Much like how the essay discussing the obsession with "decoding" Walter Pater's work in search of evidence about his sexuality was a whole bunch of nothin' new. I wasn't exactly expecting a class centered on Oscar Wilde to be the straightest thing in the world, but I didn't really anticipate that a decade of slasherdom would give me a head start on reading the academic essays, either.

(And yes, I am in fact having fun with the Grab function Macs come equipped with. I may or may not stop capping things on the internet to mock any time soon.)

I discovered a couple of days ago that there is a Kindle application for the iPod Touch. My iPod is now full of books I am assigned to read this semester. (Which are mostly public domain, so it's full of FREE books.)

This is less "ooh, shiny!" and more practical, because guess who's taking three three hundred level classes this semester? With two of them being English classes?

Yup. I am finally experiencing that reading workload English majors are always bitching about. This weekend, for example, I have four plays and somewhere around a dozen essays to get through. By Tuesday. I am only writing this post instead of reading because I have one play and a couple essays left at this point. Ugh, and some more shit by Yeats that I forgot to include in that dozen (I was including the analysis of the plays, which I don't really read that closely because Cathleen ni Houlihan is not a dense and layered work, thank you very much), but those are short. As are the plays, which I hope is why he assigned so many in one week. The essays for British Literature, though - they're not superlong for the most part, but they are the kind of academic nonsense where the writer appears to believe that "historicize" is a word. IT IS NOT A WORD, PEOPLE. What "historicize" is, is a red flag normal people use to spot academic BS a mile away. If you use it, I automatically do not take you seriously.

But anyway. I've been plowing through them madly in part because I have awesome plans with sotto_voice tonight, possible birthday lunch plans with my grandmother tomorrow (her birthday was yesterday, and no, I haven't once forgotten it in the last eight years), and I'm doing the bartending post at milliways_bar tomorrow evening. I can multitask during bartending, of course, but I think it would be rude to Lexie and Grandma to bring my books with me. XD So I've powered through most of it already, but in future will probably not try quite so hard to kill my brain by Sunday.

But just because I'm on top of the weekly reading . . . I have to have The Picture of Dorian Gray read by the beginning of October, Dracula toward the end of the semester, and Jude the Obscure and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde or whatever the actual title is somewhere in between. And that's just for British Lit. I haven't even checked yet to refresh my memory as to whether there are any novels assigned for Irish Lit. So I need to be reading along on those when I can, to avoid trying to cram them all in at the last minute. Hence having them on my iPod, because five minutes' random downtime is a couple pages of a novel.

And I haven't even gotten into the chapters needing to be read for World Wars I and II by Wednesday, or the article reviews we're supposed to be writing for Sociology. Which is my one hundred level class.

I am starting to understand the point of multiple vacation periods within a semester. It is so we do not explode.

I tell you what, though, this is forcing me to be more organized and motivated than I've been since my very first semester back in 2006. I have separate binders for each subject again. I'm thinking ahead and setting aside time for schoolwork. I NEVER think ahead. About anything. Ever. But if I don't this semester, I'm dead. And I kinda like it. For all I'm generally a disorganized mess, organization actually appeals very much to me as a person with ADD. It means I know where stuff is and what's happening when and why, and with Attention Deficit Disorder you can never, ever get too much of that. (So why don't I get organized and stay that way? Dude, why do you think it's called a disorder? Hint: Not because it makes things that are good for me easy to do.)

So. I'm gonna go read an essay before work. And, uh, I'll probably be posting a lot about school when I do post, but that's better than not posting at all, right? At least this way you know I'm alive. And, despite the complaining, happy.

Oh, man. You guys. The issue recently with posting is not that I have nothing to say since school started back up (and I got my financial aid money; I borrowed a little extra this year for reasons I shall get into in a bit), it's that I have SO MUCH TO SAY that I do not know where to start.

So I guess I'll start with my shiny new tech? (And, as it turns out, end there too.)

Reason I borrowed extra money: the Compaq Presario - which, despite HP's reputation, has served me well and faithfully - has been acting up. It probably has plenty of life left in it, but I didn't want to leave it to chance. I mean, with my luck it would die just before finals or something. So I ordered a new laptop.

Those of you who've been around for a while know of my previous laptop, the iBook. Yeah, I'm a Mac girl. My school system used Macs. The first computer I ever touched was an Apple IIe. I have no screaming objections to PCs (and, yes, would probably like them better if I knew how to work Linux, I know), but they're not what I grew up using. The iBook was my first very own, not-shared-with-the-family computer. The purchase of that computer ultimately sparked a series of misadventures that pretty much boil down to my not knowing fuck-all about owning a damn computer. I have the Presario because at one point I thought it would ultimately be cheaper to buy a PC. Guess why I thought this? I did not buy the extended warranty for the iBook. Ironically, it turns out that the malfunction in question was something that was running rampant and Apple would have FIXED IT FOR FREE anyway. *facepalm*

I still have the iBook. It works, after I got it fixed a couple of years ago (long after the window of free repair had expired, and before we got an Apple store in our local mall, so I had to use a private contractor, and I never want to know how much extra THAT cost), but there's this alarming grinding noise and seriously I never want to do the math about how much I paid for each month of use I actually got out of the damn thing. I consider it an lesson expensively learned.

When I bought the Compaq, I got the extended warranty. Through the store. Which was Circuit City. :D That's okay, though, since I had let the warranty lapse on account of the fixed iBook, pre-grinding. Um. *facepalm*

SO THE NEW COMPUTER. The new computer is a MacBook. The new computer is a MacBook PRO. The new computer is a MacBook Pro with upgraded memory and hard drive space, because the first two laptops both had about enough memory to run (and the Compaq to play some games on, though not without giving the fan a damn heart attack) and I got damn sick of programs locking up because I had the temerity to CLICK SOMETHING OMG. So the 4GB memory was probably a little bit overkill because I don't do a lot that uses a ton of memory, but by DAMN this thing is fast. It is wonderful. And I am also learning to plan ahead and leave space for what I might need a machine - not just a computer - to do a year or two from now.

My timing was awesome. Not only did I decide upon and make my purchase just after the official release of the newest OS (OSX 10.6, Snow Leopard), but I also did it while they were offering a free-after-rebate iPod Touch.

I just. You guys. Understand here that I never buy the sleek new technology, because I can't afford it and I don't care that much. I just last year got an MP3 player with video capability, and just got an MP3 player period a couple years before that. And before THAT, I was one of the only people you'd see on the bus or walking around with a freaking Discman. My new cell phone has Bluetooth capability, and I don't even know wtf that is FOR. Its only other major non-phone-related feature is a camera. I go for minimum bells and whistles and I have always liked it that way. So I'm a little overwhelmed by how much the iPod Touch can do. I feel like I've skipped right from records to CDs, and it's a bit of a shock. I wasted so much time last night playing with it - even more than I spent on my MacBook! (I got the MacBook yesterday, and had the iPod before then for some weird shipping reason, but couldn't do anything with it because I didn't want to have it, like, bond with my Presario and then have to wipe it.) I'm still not totally finished with setting the MacBook up in terms of all the files and programs and bookmarks I want, but I'm pretty happy with the state of my iPod.

And kind of sad, because I do love my Creative Zen, but it isn't compatible with Macs. Plus, it goes wonky a lot and they've stopped selling them so it's obsolete into the bargain even though I just got it last Christmas, so I have a feeling it would have needed replacing within the next year anyway. But I still love it, the dumb goofy thing, and will probably still use it from time-to-time for as long as I can get the Presario turned on to charge it.

. . . hmm. I was going to write about a bunch more stuff and then do some cuts, but I suppose I should save some stuff for future posts. I'd really like to get back into the habit of posting more than like six times a month at most.

Coming up: The hilarity of using Amazon to save money on textbooks when you have been assigned at least twenty books between four classes; realizing that you have to READ all of those books and you better get more organized than you've ever been in your life if you're going to keep up with all your classes; and what happens in your brain when all four of your classes study roughly the same time period in the same week. (I discovered in British Literature that the Yeats essays I read for Irish Literature and Culture annoyed me to death because he was an Aesthete! Go figure.)

Oh, yeah, and I bought the extended warranty for the MacBook. You better fucking believe it.

Things I am going to hell for:

* Singing Spike Jones's "Der Führer" under my breath while watching a documentary in Western Civ on Hitler's rise to power. (Okay, so this is only one thing. But it can't be good.)

Look, the documentary was awful. I mean, if a documentary uses the phrase "dark, demonic personality," can you really trust it? It's probably a bit much to demand a neutral presentation of facts when it comes to Hitler's reign, but must it be sensationalized? Isn't it shocking enough all by itself?

I Googled the doc in question and found that it was made in 1956, which explains a lot. Including my professor's use of it. I've written about this guy before, and how much I enjoy the effects of his seeming inability to move beyond a grounding point sometime in the seventies, but sometimes it is a bit questionable. There's got to be a billion documentaries on this subject that are better than The Twisted Cross. (See? Even the title is ridiculous!)

. . . anyway. I have been a bit MIA journalwise because I have been having issues with my internet, but this will hopefully be resolved shortly. In the meantime, I have a couple of stories in the works, one of which is finished and needs typing - it's written entirely by hand, on paper; it's been years since I did that! - and one of which is getting there and will need to be presented for inspection by the flist before I unleash it on fandom in general.

Occasionally, as an English major, one gets the chance to write something incredibly ridiculous. On Tuesday, I got to write and pass in a paper comparing Hamlet and The Fix. (This was my justification for paying actual money for that bootleg: "It's okay, it's for SCHOOL!")

I think my flist contains a few people as geeky as I am who might be interested in reading this paper, so I figured I'd throw it up here. It's not as thorough as I'd like - it came out to six and a half pages for a five-page assignment, and that was after skipping the comparison of Tina and Ophelia - but I think it's a decent overview. And it does contain a brief summary of The Fix (an incomplete one, but it has what you need to know for the paper), so if you're not familiar with it, it's okay.

( A closer examination, and strong familiarity with both plays, makes it clear that The Fix is in actuality an aggressively cynical retelling of Hamlet. )

My two favorite things about writing this paper:

* Srs Scholastic Discussion of fictitious gay incest

* The fact that my Works Cited contains a website entitled "Zombie Prom (A New Musical)." Guys, when you are writing about a work as obscure as The Fix, you take your outside sources where you can find 'em.

My two least favorite things about writing this paper:

* As you may have gathered, my professor has a Thing about the Oedipal complex theory; we read Hamlet for his class after reading Oedipus Rex, and also he teaches a class on Freud. I HATE the Oedipal complex theory as applied to Hamlet SO GODDAMN MUCH, but it happens to work in favor of my argument, so I went with it.

* This is my third paper on Hamlet in two semesters. (It should be my fourth, but I never did get my shit together on that assignment last semester.) Good thing I love Hamlet, right? Now can I please have at least another year before I end up studying the fucking thing again?

Boy, I love dragging myself out to campus to discover that my only class for the day has been cancelled.

. . . actually, the weather is gorgeous, my Creative Zen decided to present me with The Fix, and I walk to campus instead of taking the bus now so it was a lovely walk and I can leave whenever I want. Plus I can hang out in the computer lab and use the gigantic gorgeous Macs they have (seriously, so fucking pretty) to thread at Milliways and possibly even type up and finish polishing a Fix fic that I keep - uh, not typing and polishing.

So what was I bitching about again? MY LIFE IS SO HARD YOU GUYS.

I think I need to do another challenge request of some kind. I might do crossovers again. That was fun. I still need to round up and post the ones I did for the kiss challenge way back in like October. Which I still haven't finished fulfilling, and frankly, aside from the one I've written but not typed (you know who you are), I can't do the ones I have left. I just have nothing coming to mind whatsoever. That happens with these challenges; there are always a couple that don't click for me. Anyway. I suppose I could get going on compiling those here on the gorgeous Mac too.

A few random items, because I would like to get into the habit of, like, posting again. Or at least to not have entries on the front page that are from October.

* My Western Civ professor is about as stereotypical as a history professor can get. It's amazing. His terminology is grounded firmly in the seventies at the latest - he refers to "examinations," which I of course am aware of as a term for tests, but I have never once had a teacher who used it before now. He also explained to us about Louis XVI being in "the hoosegow" during part of the French Revolution. The hoosegow, you guys. And he said it twice. I kind of love him a lot.

Also, his scorn for the aforementioned Louis XVI knows no bounds. He kept cracking on the guy for not being able to make a damn decision, and he would do it in this polite-history-teacher way that just made it more awesome. He sounds like he's editing himself for the classroom, but if there was some kind of French History Bitching Session, he would just let it rip and really tear Louis XVI a new one.

* Victoria's Secret sells lollipops. I do not know if this is a new thing, since I only started shopping for proper bras (as opposed to sports bras for Wal-Mart) like six months ago, but it is new to me. And hilarious. And of course I bought one.

. . . and, since it was of a particular brand, it qualified me for a free small stuffed dog. It is flashy and ridiculous and I cannot determine a reason for it to exist, and I have a history of naming stuffed animals after characters in whatever fandom I'm in at the time. So, obviously, Bewildering Scribble Dog's name is Jack.

* The series three Doctor Who finale arc makes less sense every time I watch it. It also makes me want to write more year that never was fic. And that just brings me back to the stagnating recent-past-paradigm, because even though I STILL have no idea where to end it and have more or less decided that including the YTNW is not entirely workable, I just still can't shake the idea. Maybe it needs to be another fic, or something. Maybe there's a reason I can't get any farther with what I've got. Maybe I need to suck it up and start writing the damn thing again already. It might help to start doing drabbles again or something.

* The finale does, however, contain one of my favorite lines, after Saxon greets the President right before the broadcast: "Can I make you some tea? Or is that not American enough? *pause* Can I make you some grits? What are grits, anyway?" Because he doesn't go for the obvious coffee joke! Also: GRITS. Ha. I wonder if RTD was aware of that joke being extra-funny because grits are a specifically Southern food, and a lot of our Presidents have been Southern. If it was just because grits are inherently funny, that's okay too.

* Seriously. Does anyone know of a good drabble challenge community that I can use to get myself posting again? I spent about a month last year posting drabbles every day and it was fun! For me, at least.

Oh my god, I haven't posted in almost two weeks. How did that happen??

I ATEN'T DEAD.

Things I have done in the past two weeks:

* Written two awesome papers and one crappy one.

* Accurately pegged a fellow classmate as nineteen based entirely on his world-weary disdain for the vast majority of society. I told him he reminded me of a cross between Chuck Bass (world-weary disdain etc) and Dan Humphrey (sense of intellectual superiority). I have a good feeling about his future self, though. He does, after all, have the taste and intelligence to dislike The Catcher in the Rye when he could just as easily go in the opposite direction and identify with it. *shudder*

* Spent two hundred bucks at Amazon on my textbook for the semester. The most expensive one was a bit over fifty bucks. And I didn't even buy them used. Let's hear it for a) being an English major (no expensive math or science textbooks!) and b) having budget-conscious professors!

* Part of that order was the latest translation of Les Miserables. You guys, I have finally found a translated novel that I can enjoy reading. I am very wary of translations. So often something goes wrong and the book ends up feeling detached, like instead of reading the story, I am reading about the story. This is a really good one, though; the translator, Julie Rose, has updated some of the language and used idioms to make it more accessible and genuine, but has still kept the feel of a novel that takes place in early-ish nineteenth century France. I don't know much about translation, or about Les Mis, but the quotes on the book jacket tell me that she has given the novel "the captivating tone Hugo would have struck for his own contemporaries." This makes a lot of sense to me. Older novels can be such dry going for modern readers, but they wouldn't have been back when they were published, would they? (I mean, unless they sucked.) So, anyway, I'm enjoying the book a lot, and I know I have Julie Rose as well as Victor Hugo to thank for that. You can be reading the most amazing book in the world, but if the translation is crap, you'll never know it.

* TV! Gossip Girl and Supernatural and Dexter and House and The Sarah Jane Adventures! I should probably get back in gear and start writing post-ep reactions again. And maybe I can even keep them below the epic length that my Doctor Who series four ones tends to reach.

OH I HAVE A VERY IMPORTANT QUESTION. Ugly Betty people! I got irritated and disillusioned with the show last year for starting to rely too much on easy jokes and contrived, cheap crap. I made it through the entirety of season two and decided not to continue for season three, but - the episode blurbs are making me curious. So, has it gotten better? It is anywhere near the standard of awesome that the first season set? Or should I just let it go?

* Ridiculous things in Milliways that I won't specify here because the five people on my flist who care are fellow Milliwaysers and already know. For the most part. But trust me, they are ridiculous. (The things. Not the people.)

* Whiling away boring lectures by writing terrible Les Mis slash. I think I might be able to turn it into something that doesn't suck, but right now, I would not show it to another human being.



So! That's what I've been doing. Uh. I will try not to let another two weeks pass before my next post. :D?