burning like matchsticks in the face of the darkness

[Though apparently I'm not gonna repeat it tonight.  Oops.  P.S. I am in the market for a good "tired" icon.  A good lightning one would be lovely as well.]

Today there were luncheon leftovers including vegetarian sandwiches!  (I took one and made Alyssa take one for dinner.)

And B's RA's parents went to Switzerland and brought her back cookies, so I had 2 yummy chocolatey Swiss cookies.

On my way back to Harvard Square I saw Patty S. -- one of the people from h.s. I regret not getting to know better.  I had to go get my train, but we caught up briefly and I got her e-mail address.

So warm coming home tonight.  Hard to believe it was only 64F.

Swung by the library on the way home.  Terry was at Smith -- last weekend I think -- with Colleen.  He agreed that it's a pretty campus.  (Speaking of: Google fight, courtesy of polymexina.)

Chatting with my mom tonight, I said, "I hope London and Kuwait e-mail back tomorrow" and my mom looked very confused.  "This will sound stupid," she said, after a minute, "but I forgot you had a job."  She thought I was talking LJ people or something.

She was making cookie press cookies, and one of them got kinda warped and looked like it was giving you the finger.  "That'll be your cookie," she said, and I insisted that she take a photograph.  This reminded me of the penis cake I never got around to linking to.  Also: someone recently suggested that fandom needs choose-your-own porn (like the choose-your-own adventure books).

My advisor (former I suppose, but I expect to use the title in perpetuity) is darling.  Also, damn, his partner's mother died last week.  I had no idea.  Meep.

Romeo and Juliet told entirely in emoticons (linked by various flisters).

I need to reread the Time Quartet, and I've also been meaning to read the Austin Family books.  Of course, I needed an in-order title list for the latter.  Amazon is so thoughtful.

Look: female character gen ficathon.  I haven't done a ficathon since the Ethan ficathon in April (unless femslash_minis backup counts -- and I don't count it, 'cause it was more like adopting a plotbunny) and I have been definitively not signing up for any of the Secret Santa things but yeah, I totally signed up.

Read an interesting article in the WSJ today.  ("Uncertain Miracle: A Biotech Drug Extends a Life, But at What Price?" - front page, left column, if you're interested -- though WSJ allows online access only to subscribers)  This woman has a rare disease and wonders every day if that day is worth the thousands of dollars that day's medications cost -- which hooked me, 'cause it's a refreshing change from the entitled sense that of course you deserve everything modern medicine can offer.  The section that struck me most is as follows.

     WritersCare, another health-insurance group they had joined, sent a letter saying it was going under because of high costs.  Ms. Lees was convinced she had driven the health fund out of business.
     "Do I have any right to consume such a large percentage of the health-care dollars in this country?" she asked her husband.  Many people would say I'm being greedy--and they would be right."
     "It's not your fault the drug costs so much," Mr. Lees told her.

(The related article -- "Why Genzyme Can Charge So Much for Cerezyme" -- explains: "There is no competition, patients are desperate and most insurers pay. // Genzyme says it keeps the price high to help it pay for the hunt for other drugs and also to fund programs that allow it to give away a small part of its production [to countries that can't afford to pay the high price].")  It raises interesting issues about the obligations of insurance companies, drug companies, etc., but I was even more interested in the issue of "How much money is it worth to keep you functional each day?"

O come, O come, Emmanuel
and ransom captive Israel

Checking my mail today, i finally got my official letter from UPenn. It ends with: "I trust you have been, or will soon be, admitted elsewhere to a university of your choice, and I should like to take this opportunity to wish you luck and success in your graduate studies." How bittersweet.

I e-mailed Michael and Doug and heart them both muchly. ( selections )

Only one person on my flist mentioned Andrea Dworkin's death. Interesting.

I am jealous of Chloe's necklace that says "Homo" on one side, and "Sapiens" on the other.

"Does one kiss in youth make you a lesbian?"
"Does thinking about it for the rest of your life make it a possibility?"
♥

Having the flist try to guess my favorite character/pairing in assorted fandoms seems rather silly, not least because i don't exactly have favorites. I'm more intrigued by the "which character am I like," though the answers to that one feel rather obvious. I'm interested to hear what the answers for Firefly would be, though. So yeah, which character (can be a boy) am i most like in any of the fandoms i'm familiar with -- Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Wonderfalls, Harry Potter, X-Men movieverse, TNG, Voyager, BSC, anything else that comes to mind.

Not that i don't love the weather we've been having, but i feel a twinge of jealousy re: Boston's snow. Yes, i am a freak.

In other unpopular opinions, i have no problem with the following (other than the fact that i'm unsure how one tells the difference between feral and non-feral cats and suspect that could lead to some serious problems). Clearly my father was far too much of an influence on me.

"A wild or feral cat is an unprotected species in Minnesota," said Mark Holsten, Department of Natural Resources deputy commissioner. They can be shot or trapped or otherwise killed as a nuisance animal, like gophers, skunks or weasels, Holsten said.

"If you have feral cats on your property, you can shoot them. They're [like] a gopher or a woodchuck," Holsten said.

-from the Minneapolis Star Tribune as quoted by Ann Althouse

I can't actually stand to plod through this entire 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2004, list, but i do enjoy that John Kerry beats out George W. Bush in with the explanation: "Managed to lose to the most hated president in American history by virtue of his total inability to convincingly portray himself as a human being."

Lynne Edwards (Editor) and Katy Stevens (Associate Editor) invite your submissions for the first issue of Watcher Junior, a refereed, electronic journal for undergraduate student scholarship in Buffy Studies. Completed essays and research papers will be reviewed by members of the board and will be accepted for publication if three reviewers approve. Essays that do not receive approval for publication will be returned with feedback for re-submission.

We welcome completed essays and research papers on any aspect of BtVS, Angel, or both programs. All papers should exhibit familiarity with previously published scholarship in Buffy Studies. The editors accept essays with a variety of recognized documentation styles (APA, MLA, or Chicago); however, all submissions should include a list of Works Cited.

Submit your work electronically as an e-mail attachment in Microsoft Word (.doc) or in Rich Text Format (.rtf). Be sure to number your paragraphs in the text you submit. Send it simultaneously to Lynne Edwards at edwards@slayage.tv and Katy Stevens at stevens@slayage.tv.

Please contact us (Lynne or Katy) via email with questions.

-from here, hat tip: viciouswishes

Must edit and submit my "Sacrifice and Chosen-ness from the Israelites to Sunnydale: The Aqedah, Jesus, and Buffy Summers" paper.

Fill your lives with love and bravery
And you shall lead a live uncommon

I have been encouraged and comforted by seeing people moving away from "All those people who voted against what i want are stupid/crazy/ignorant/evil" and trying out the idea of respectfully listening to what other people have to say, meeting them where they are, searching for common ground. Thank you. That so many people are moving in this direction after such a divisive election gives me real hope for humanity/the future.

( quoteage from dorrie6 )

Interesting: electoral map in shades of violet.

wisdomeagle talks about state-marriage and i am reminded of jacklemmon et al and state!porn.

A feel better meme, from scribbulus_ink:

In your journal, rec a story that you re-read for comfort when you need to feel better because it gives you warm fuzzies, a story you read recently that was scorchingly hot, and a long story that you re-read because you can lose yourself in it. It can be any pairing, any rating, any fandom.

This morning i was thinking about how my Bible paper would probably work as my 10-page writing sample for grad schools, and then it occurred to me that i could totally talk about parallels to Buffy and turn it into my 20-page paper for UPenn as well. Yeah, that was my uber!dork moment for the day.

Have i mentioned that my adviser is the cutest thing ever? /exaggeration He’s writing something about representations of despair (article? book? i don’t know) and i had told him about Sandman so he was asking me if there were specific stories that focused on Despair, so thanks to oyceter and neil_gaiman i got a nice list, which i then e-mailed to him. His response, in its entirety: THANK YOU!

I e-mailed different people at UC-Davis and Illinois-Urbana this afternoon after having gotten unhelpful or nonexistent responses from people earlier this week and i got responses within hours. Helpful ones, no less. Joy.

I almost didn’t go to UMass class today, but i’m glad i did because Le Thi Diem Thuy was actually really interesting.

Walking back to the bus stop after class i was reminded that although i enjoy t-shirt and jeans weather and heavy layers are annoying, i really love the seasons changing.

Thanks to athene for the link to songs from Firefly. (Do Ctrl+F for [ Monday, March 29, 2004 - 23:55 ] for the full mp3 list. See also here.) Meredith, did you ever get an mp3 of “The Hero of Canton”? This has the clip from the ep plus the DVD feature.

Listening to some of the clips (there are dialogue clips as well as just musical interludes) is making me damn sappy, though.

---

I don’t even know who started this meme:

If you happen to be working on some creative writing project, fanfiction or NaNoWriMo or what have you, post exactly one sentence from each of your current work(s) in progress in your journal. It should probably be your favourite or most intriguing sentence so far, but what you choose is entirely your discretion. Mention the title (and genre) if you like, but don't mention anything else -- this is merely to whet the general appetite for your forthcoming work(s).

I have umpteen unfinished works, but here are the 3 things i’m working on at the moment:

= River’s voice echoes in Jayne’s mind at odd moments, and sometimes he wakes in the dark, certain that she is standing in the room with him.

= He would wonder later if this was part of why their parents sent her to the special Academy.

= The fact that his body didn’t seem to be radiating any heat should have been disconcerting, but in the hot and sweaty Bronze it was actually comforting.

It amuses me when professors think i’m so much smarter than i am. In his comments on my etymology paper, Doug wrote “I’m especially impressed by the way you manage those long sentences in ¶ 4: so deftly that your reader can almost see the smile with which you must have written them --- a smile of awareness that you’re (partly) parodying the style of dictionaries. The ability to produce this sort of gentle parody is, I think, an infallible sign of a good ear for language.” Hey, if you think so, who am i to argue? I had a long and complicated etymology to distill. I didn’t know any better way to do it than to basically make a long list. But if he thinks i was gently parodying, fine.

Maggie IMed me yesterday, sent me a great link. I was struck by how very true it is. It’s so sad in a way, that part of our lives (life up to leaving for college) is gone forever. Now we have 2 lives to balance, and nothing seems as permanent as it did before. We've moved away and often moved on. And now we have the summer ahead in which we will attempt to once again have what we had before, but no matter how successful we are, it'll never be the same.

Maggie wrote:
the part that struck me the most was the whole resentment
you resented your college friends initially because they didn't have the background we felt they need to "understand us"
now we resent our high school buddies cause they weren't there this whole year!

It took me a few readings to quite understand what she was saying, and it was definitely something i hadn’t seen in the piece when i first read it, but after rereading the article i realized that we were basically both talking about the same thing, just coming at it from different places.

Okay, so that didn’t fit the theme of this post because i really don’t have anything to say about expectations of friendships in college.

Norwood went to the MICCA (Massachusetts Instrumental and Choral Conductors Association) competition yesterday. This is a statewide competition. Junior high and high school groups perform in front of a panel of judges who make comments (on audio tapes during the performance, and then one adjudicator has a clinic with the group after the performance) and the groups are awarded medals on their own merits (i.e. more than one group is going to get a gold medal; you’re not competing against the other groups). Groups who play poorly may receive a Certificate of Merit or (even worse) a Certificate of Participation (also given to groups who opt for comments only), but most of the groups who go receive a gold, silver, or bronze medal because if you don’t think you’re good enough to get a medal, you probably aren’t gonna go. Anyway, the Norwood High School band has gotten gold for probably as long as they have been going to MICCA, and the orchestra got gold for possibly the first time ever my freshman year. We (the high school orchestra--which i was in) got gold all of my high school career, except my senior year when we got a silver, which sadly i think we probably deserved--which isn’t to say that people weren’t crushed, many even in tears.

So this year the orchestra got gold, which was great. The band played later, so their results were announced at a later ceremony. And for the first time, the Wind Ensemble (a select group of members of the band) also performed. My dad (who was a chaperone) said that the guy who did the clinic for the band said things like, "You play very well; I have to be picky to find things wrong." Then at the awards ceremony it was announced that the Norwood High School Band had requested comments only and would receive a Certificate of Participation. This next paragraph is from an e-mail from my dad:

So the orchestra got on one bus and part of the band got on the other bus and the members of the Wind Ensemble remained to compete in the evening portion. Mr. Holland went to see off the band bus, got on, and said," You must feel good; you played great." "Um, but why didn't we get a medal?" "If two groups overlap [like the band and the Wind Ensemble] they both can't compete for a medal. But that's not what's important. You should feel good because you played well. That's what matters."

So yeah, the mood on the bus ride home was not good. A lot of people were saying they were going to quit band. Turns out my brother’s dropping band next year, had already decided this--news to me. He’s gonna take computers next year and then TV. He pleads lack of time, which i don’t really buy since band doesn’t have many outside rehearsals and although he should practice, he does fine without. He’s been not really into band for a while, though, and i would rather he spend his time doing something he wants to do.

When George was first telling me i was thinking, "Oh there must be more to this," but i'm not sure there is. It's just such a bad move, on so many levels, that i have a really hard time believing Mr. Holland was really as stupid as he seems.
1) It shows a real lack of respect for the students to not tell them that the band isn't going to get a medal. I understand not telling them before they perform because you want them to play their best and you know they'll be less motivated if they're not gonna get a medal, but at least tell them before the awards are announced. He knows how psyched up we get waiting to hear the results, and he must remember from last year’s orchestra trauma how emotionally invested we can be in the results.
2) It's really unfair. These kids worked really hard. It's great to get a reward, recognition for your hard work. Why deprive the kids of that?
3) It's great to get to play at Tanglewood or wherever. Mr. Holland has even said what a great experience that is. [A few years ago, MICCA started a Stars at Symphony program in which the groups who earn a gold medal have the opportunity to perform at Symphony Hall or Tanglewood.]
4) You've gotta know it's gonna upset kids, make them less motivated for the rest of the year, cause a lot of kids to drop the class.
5) If it really is just about performing and getting comments, why not opt for just comments for everyone? There's a reason we've chosen to get judged every year.
6) Mr. Alberta loves getting gold; i'll be really interested to find out how he reacts. Especially because this is his last year as Director of Fine Arts for the Norwood school system; he’s retiring.

The lovely Allison got me a livejournal on Monday, so now i’m finally posting. (Results of online quiz binges will still be here.)

My parents sent me an Easter basket - yay for wonderful parental units! And my mom’s so cool; she always sends me neat clippings. This time a Boston Magazine article on creative writing at MIT, which was very interesting, and an article in O about the difficulties of intimacy by Amy Bloom (whom my mom knows i love). And an advertising clipping -- “Not all the good ones are gay or taken. Some are both.” and then in smaller lettering: “You are as committed as any two people could be. Now that you’ve found each other, celebrate your partnership with a dazzling symbol from Shreve’s Commitment Ring Collection. Whether it be a commitment ceremony or other significant occasion, Shreve’s has a style perfect for your exchange of rings.” Yes, i know it’s what one should expect (advertisers want to have everyone buy their stuff) but it still makes me happy to see non-heterosexual relationships recognized as being totally on par with heterosexual relationships.

After reading the stuff my mom sent, i had 2 simultaneous thoughts. One, the two people i’m in most regular contact with from high school are non-heterosexual guys, and two, Yumi’s article in external text 6. It’s called “queer kids and kinship” and in it she talks about how most of the people she was friends with in high school have since come out. Of course the three people i consider my really good friends from college (Yes, this includes you, Sharon, even though you don’t go to my college.) are heterosexual, but i just thought it was interesting.

“For the past few years I have just considered myself queer. To me, queer merely means I don’t fit into the dominant heterosexual paradigm. It means I can be attracted to girls, boys, both, or no one. It’s a large, fluid category that goes beyond hetero/homo/bi/asexual.”
-from “The Mixed-Race Queer Girl Manifesto” by Lauren Martin in Quantify #1

In my English Language class we’re currently discussing the actual production of books, and our handouts on printing included something irrelevant just because my professor loves it -- the passage from the so-called “Wicked Bible” (printed in 1631 by Robert Barker). Exodus 20:14 (the 7th of the 10 Commandments) reads “Though shalt commit adultery.” I had just finished reading Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett yesterday. In it, “Aziraphale (An angel, and part-time rare book dealer)” has “a complete set of the Infamous Bibles, individually named from errors in typesetting.” When i first read it i thought it was made up, though i wondered if perhaps there was some truth to it since i got the feeling that these writers were very factually accurate. I recognized the Wicked Bible as being one of the ones mentioned. I told this to Doug and highly recommended the book, so he’s going to borrow my copy. Huzzah for the sharing of the good.

I did a little online research tonight and actually found two essentially identically websites (1 & 2) which explain the hundreds of references contained in the book -- many more references than i had known there were (though i got a few, and being not British my ignorance of most is quite excusable). Turns out actually all the “Infamous Bibles” (except the “Charing Cross Bible” and the “Buggre Alle This Bible”) are real. This makes me very happy.

And of course, a belated room draw post. I didn’t have a roommate picked, so i was feeling very “just give me a room, preferably on the 2nd floor, and a roommate i can mesh okay with; i don’t care.” But then i picked the second lowest (read: second-best) number in my class. So i have a single next year. Wow. It’ll be a bit weird since it’s one of the smaller singles and i’m currently in one of the larger doubles, but i don’t really care. I don’t need a whole lot of space.

And it seems like lots of other people are having good days, too, so yay for that.