“what doesn’t bend breaks...”

But really, if you bend something enough, it will break.

My brain hurts. This is due in part to not getting enough sleep.

Also, i think i would be happy if i never heard the name Iraq ever again. Maybe never heard the word war either.

I want to gorge myself on tea and chocolate-covered strawberries while watching Hedwig or some other shiny queer movie with Marnie and Layna. I think that’s really what i want right now. Instead, i am attending the beginning of the civil liberties conference at 4:30, then coming back here for bad food, and then going back. And still lots of readings on policy and such for my environmental ethics class. Have to keep reminding myself it is the last class tomorrow. I have gotten so used to it being interterm i think there's more of it left than there actually is.

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Thanks to Miranda thanks to antheia for a bunch o’ links (which i haven’t anywhere near finished going through):

• http://madre.org/co_iraq_thanksgiving.html
  
• http://www.fair.org/international/iraq.html
  
• http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/iraq/
  
• http://www.unicef.org/noteworthy/iraq/unicef-in-iraq.html
  
• http://www.iq.undp.org/about_iraq.htm

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I really like my environmental ethics interterm class. Lots of interesting readings and a good group of people. I love that they acknowledge that things are complex and interrelated and all that -- oh how i hate the tendency of Smithies (and many others) to just say “This is how it is.” And i get to play Devil’s Advocate a lot, which i always enjoy.

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Haven’t been able to find much on the movie Frida.

“Clean-shaven carnality” -- a Salon.com article by David Thompson. Most everyone knows Frida Kahlo had a unibrow, and in the movie Salma Hayek has something of one. I was impressed that they didn’t make Frida mad-glamorous since she was played by Salam Hayek. I haven’t been able to find any photographic evidence that Frida had a mustache, but will take this author’s word for it (though i feel it bears consideration that in all her self-portraits, her unibrow is prominent but rarely is a mustache visible).

And i learned that she had polio as a child, something that is never mentioned in the film, though it explains why when we first see Frida in the film she walks somewhat awkwardly.

I could have sworn it had to be right around freezing to snow.

But i walked out of Wright Hall and it was snowing, is snowing, is very pretty in fact, but really bloody cold. Weather.com says 7 degrees, feels like negative ten, in Chicopee Falls as of 5:55pm.

snow update

Apparently snow can form when it is at or below freezing. And it comes in 6 shapes, with larger flakes forming nearer freezing. So why did i think snow only formed when it was very near freezing?

One less errand!

I have one check left in my checkbook, so i thought i would have to go down to the bank tomorrow and get more, but tonight i realized that i have a pack of 25 more. I still have to go to CVS to buy more tissues, because i only have 1 left of those too, but still.

Makes you feel downright warm here, no?

Tonight i learned that the record low here was negative 30 degrees Fahrenheit in 1961. Temps like that killed people in Russia around this time last year. Don't y'all feel so much warmer now? Temps for the next week (here anyway) are actually supposed to be highs in the twenties, and later into the thirties. And yo, all the lows are supposed to be freezing or above.

The state low was negative 35 back in 1981, and the coldest ever east of the Mississippi in this nation was negative 54 back in 1922. And yes, all these were in the month of January. The national record was -79.8, but that was on an Alaskan mountain, and the record for the contiguous 48 was -69.7 in Montana (again, mountains).