burning like matchsticks in the face of the darkness

(the_red_shoes thought "Still not king" was a reference to Hamlet.  Heart.)


This morning, Andy looked at my desk and then at me and said, "Your artwork?"
"No, my friend Allie."
"Very talented."
"Well on her behalf, Thank you."

I was talking with Barbara and said that this is part of that sliver in time in which I and everyone else can agree that we like the weather, though for me it is tainted by knowledge of what's to come.

Have I mentioned recently how much I love obsessiveicons?  I've been hunting icons for that enveloped by warmth happy feeling and have found a number of lovely icons (some of which definitely don't fit the criteria but which I'm hanging on to for the moment 'cause I like them).  ( posted here: more for my own reference than anything else )

While searching ... oh, The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry).  *shivers*  (in a good way)

Also: lizards!  That reminds me that as well as potatoes and blood I need a lizard icon.  I'm not super taken with my options in the linked post, though.

Today I was wearing my black Limited shirt with the white pinstripes, with my bluegreen camisole under it.  Mary Alice said, "I love that shirt on you... with that neckline and then the bit under it... very flattering."

During lunch we watched the first few minutes of "It's Only a Paper Moon" (DS9 7.10) and I teared up because I am a huge sap, and I was thinking how this remains true even though I hate people, and how my hatred of people has been way more prevalent recently than usual.  I've been saying it often for a few years (and Cat has latched onto it like whoa) but I feel like it didn't use to be as true as it is now, like things didn't grate as much.
     I was thinking on the train home how it's interesting that I am so Libertarian (i.e. committed to "do what you want so long as you don't hurt anyone else") since I have such a low opinion of just about everyone.  Of course, I am forever pointing out that if you give the government lots of power eventually people you don't like will be in power and you will be in trouble; and since there are very few people I would want in power, well . . . .

[Edit: rhipowered used to have an icon that said, "Ravenclaw: It's not that we're smarter than you -- except we totally are." I may need to track down one of those.]

Back to the story of my full work day:

This morning/afternoon I actually had insufficient deskspace (I have huge amounts of space -- Eric is jealous/bitter -- but I currently have boxes and boxes of review materials) and I also kept losing papers -- oh that "losing my mind" kind of a day.

I realized that come tomorrow afternoon sanity will return, because Prof.B. isn't teaching Thursday or Friday -- this week he's teaching 2 classes Monday, 1 Tuesday, and 2 Wednesday.  So since he and his RA were both out of the country for the past week plus, it's been intense.  RA is consistently ever so grateful for what I do, and I still maintain that she does way more than I do.

Minimally stressful tasks today included photocopying chapter 16 of Dave Barry for the NOM faculty's enjoyment.

RA brought chocolate coconut rum balls from Puerto Rico.  Mmm, yum.
We are also attempting to make plans to go out for Happy Hour the end of this week (i.e., Friday) 'cause we definitely deserve it.

thistlerose sent me "gravel"!

Why do I not know when Senior Banquet is?  My guess is the weekend of April 22, but I honestly do not know.

One problem with having a social life is it makes it difficult to go shopping or apt. hunting since I only have enough free time to do either/or.  Life is pain, princess :)


I'm reading Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth, and while I'm not sure anything will ever fully redeem Brueggemann for "Maintaining Thick Narrative Against Thin Ideology" and I still haven't been able to get through The Prophetic Imagination, I do find myself really liking a lot of the prayers in this book (and just as importantly, there has been little that has upset me).  Recently I was struck by "the sounds of justice and judgment; / the images of Sodom and Gomorrah; / the imperatives of widows and orphans."  [In "Even on such a day," 2001, p. 37.]  Given Emma and I and the Horsepersons of the Apocalypse, I was so pleased to see Sodom and Gomorra implicitly in the context of poor hospitality (which is what just about everyone inside the Bible itself is talking about when they reference it).

Full text of that section: "We are bewildered, undone, frightened, / and then intrude the cadences of these old poets: / the cadences of fidelity and righteousness; / the sounds of justice and judgment; / the images of Sodom and Gomorrah; / the imperatives of widows and orphans."

Wednesday

The $50thou Millionaire question I had no clue about (The Model T originally sold for . . . ( answer is )) and usually when you switch the question the new one they give you is nigh impossible, but this one was "which gemstone, whose name comes from from the Greek meaning against intoxication, was supposed to protect one from the effects of drunkenness?" and I knew the answer even before they listed them (only because it was in something I'd read recently but can't recall -- possibly "Golden City Far" by Gene Wolfe in Flights: extreme visions of fantasy ed. Al Sarrantonio, but that feels wrong; probably some Cicada short story) ( and the options are )  I should have known the $100thou ("Exit, pursued by a bear") but didn't ( and the answer to that one is ).

Afterward we watched the beginning of the DS9 ep "Trials and Tribble-ations."

O'Brien: chroniton particles...
me: "Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time."

O'Brien: There's a ship directly in front of us.
Mary Alice: It's the Enterprise!
Viewscreen: [shows the Enterprise]
Mary Alice and I: [surprised and impressed at Mary Alice's random guess being right]

Odo: "She called it a Tribble!"
Worf: Grr! and fear.
me: I was wondering if anyone remembered.  So he [Kirk] has the biggest file on record; something like this should stick out.

We dispersed back to work not long after, and I Googled to get the gist of the remainder of the episode.

Isabel:  I get out of class at about 5:30, so we can meet for dinner whenever you get out from work (any suggestions about where to go?).
Me: [suggests Veggie Planet]
Isabel: YES! Finally someone who'll go to Veggie Panet with me. I've been wanting to try it, but I'm friends with carnivores opposed to green and grainy things.

One of these days I'll order something other than the same thing I always order there, but this was not that night.  We saw Crash [lj entry here] and because I had plenty of time before I needed to leave to get my train home we hung out in TeaLuxe for a while afterward.

Overheard in Harvard Square: "my LiveJournal post."

Oh, I forgot to mention.  When I was at the library, Saturday before last, some girls (age 12 maybe?) were printing stuff out and I totally saw the fanfiction.net logo on top.  I restrained myself from enquiring as to the fandom.

Proof that I am not all about Teh Gay, Isabel was telling me I needed to see Capote, and what sold me was her talk about a connection between In Cold Blood and To Kill A Mockingbird.

Thursday

Really tired again this morning, natch.  (Home ~11:30 the previous night.)  Was really tempted to ride the Red Line out to Alewife and then back to Harvard so I could get more nap time in, but I didn't.

I was strangely awake all day, though.  Which was good, as I didn't really want a repeat of the previous day when I was ready to fall asleep at my desk around four o'clock.

According to the 2004 Census, the median age of first-time brides in the U.S. is: ( have a guess? your options are . . . ).  They also asked asked the real name of the horse who played Mr. Ed -- ( options are )

I learned that Laura lives in Braintree.  It thus stuns me that she drives in to work.  I mean Braintree is at one end of the Red Line.  Though I don't know what HBS's employee discount for parking is, so maybe it actually is cheaper to drive in to work than to park at Braintree and drive in.  (I didn't ask 'cause we were talking after work and I really had to be heading to the Square -- as it was I ran hardcore.)

Watched Fantastic Four with my mom [lj entry here]

Friday

As previously mentioned, this was a very slow day.

I'd brought a coat in preparation for the evening but didn't wear it at all in the morning and was surprised at just how cold it had gotten when I left work.  I walked to the Square with Alyssa, and we parted ways where the galleria thing is

I was a couple minutes later getting to the T Station than I sometimes am, but there were a lot of people already waiting, so clearly a train hadn't come too recently.

There was a guy playing accordion, and he didn't look so great but the music was quite good so I gave him money.
little girl: "What are you doing?"
guy: "I'm trying to make my rent; that's what I'm doing."

The travel experience was downhill from there.  The little kids weren't that bad -- the "I hate trains" little boy shut up after a couple stops -- but the mom made me seethe.  As the train got more crowded she jokingly yelled "I can't breathe!" and I was willing to let that go 'cause she'd had a long day or whatever, ditto her scolding her daughter like three times for hugging a stranger (as far as I could tell, the girl did it once, but the mom scolded her repeatedly).  One of the kids was calling someone else a vampire and I wasn't sure if it was another kid or a passenger -- by this point there were multiple people in the aisle between us.  Then the mom was griping to her friend about feeling faint (I guess) and how she might fall into some guy, and her friend commented, "make sure it's not an ugly guy" and she responded that it would probably be a lesbian (in this "that would be even worse" tone) and I was kinda seething at this.  Were it not for the fact that there were a lot of people in between us and (and really this was the primary reason) the fact that she was getting off one stop before me and I didn't wanna hold up this ride any more than it already was I like to think I would in fact have lectured her.  After she got out one woman actually vocalized "I'm glad she's gone" (she had been loudly complaining the entire duration between Park and Downtown about how she was gonna have to turn this stroller around and people needed to get out of her way, and I imagine a lot of us were thinking, "Well there's no space to move until the doors open, and what were you thinking at rush hour Friday before a 3-day weekend anyway?").  Park St. was the start of the stupid people standing on the yellow line as if there would magically be more space in the car, and when I got out at South Station I ran almost all the way up and got there at five-forty-one.  My train leaves at five-forty.  I was pissed.

My dad mentioned on Thursday that NHS was doing Doctor Faustus as their competition play.  I'd been meaning to read that (as well as Geothe's Faust) for ages.  Getting in to Norwood Depot ~6:13 would give me plenty of time to walk up to the Savage Center old Junior High North, but 6:45?  Cutting it much closer.  The train got in more like 6:50, and uphill in the wind?  Ow, my legs.  I actually wondered if I should just go home and go to bed.  I only got there a few minutes late, though.  I really like the way they did Mephistophilis and don't really have any other comments, in part because I did doze off at the end, due to the aforementioned tiredness.  It felt like all the events of the play happened way too fast, so I got the play out from the library so I can better critique Marlowe (and also compare Goethe; yay Harvard Classics putting them both in a single volume).

I was gonna go to bed early but got sucked into watching bits of the Olympics with my mom.  I learned that ice dancing is teh boring.  Watching the slalom I told my mom about the Ani lyric -- unable to save ourselves from the quaint tragedies we invent and undo, from the stupid circumstances we slalom through.

So yes, I saw Lindsey Jacobellis.  ( Read more... )

Saturday

I was the Great and Amazing Sloth, which didn't entirely make sense to me as I wasn't that tired during the day on Friday and though I stayed up a few hours later than I would have preferred it wasn't that late; and I'm mostly over my cold.  So yeah, my Saturday was far less productive than I had previously intended.

I went to the library (as mentioned above) and weather.com said it was 24F feels like 9F.  I actually felt less cold coming back when it was supposedly 22F feels like 7F.  Shrug.  I was pleased by the cold both times, natch.

Oh, and my dad made stir fry tonight and he made stir fry tofu for me and I appreciated the protein but . . . flavor. My dad said he thought when I said I didn't like food with flavor I was just joking. Now okay I have had food that I find unpleasantly tasteless, but clearly he hasn't been paying attention. :) [Course, we so rarely have food at my house, how would one even know ;) ]