burning like matchsticks in the face of the darkness

Is it drier today than it was yesterday?  'Cause I went outside ~2:00 when it was ~91F and it wasn't deathly.

My second-floor, not-air-conditioned, residence was even comfortably habitable.

I forewent (yes, that is correct) getting my hair cut after work due to hunger pangs, but of course when I did get home I wasn't inclined to cook dinner. (It's still summer heat.) Sigh.

However, I bought a cookie sheet when I was at Target yesterday and wondered why I had done that since I'm really not gonna bake, but tonight it occurred to me that I could bake my frozen french fries on it (esp. since our toaster oven isn't very big).

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Harvard - Radcliffe Summer Theatre is doing You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown.  Should I go?  Would I like it?

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I was looking at my yogurt container at lunch today (Yoplait, Peaches&Cream) and it said something about how consuming dairy helps your body burn calories ... I forget the exact wording (maybe it was about this?), and the containers I have in the fridge don't have it, but it was definitely weird.  I've been reading Food Politics, so I've been sensitized to how the meat and dairy industries influence what kinds of notices get put on food.

Midday news: Nestlé bought Jenny Craig.  They own Lean Cuisine and a whole lotta other brands.  Reading Food Politics also made me want to boycott Nestlé because of the whole marketing infant formula in the Third World thing.  As I was reading the book and thinking about boycotting Nestlé, I was also thinking about how I'd certainly at least heard of this boycott before and had just brushed it off as I do all things from The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy.  It's kind of sad how my instinctive reaction to anything resembling The Left is to disagree/oppose.  (Four years at Smith plus a contrary nature will do that, I suppose.)

I already boycott Philip Morris ['cause they're selling death which I just don't truck with], which means abstaining from all Kraft and Nabisco (and Miller beer, but I barely drink beer -- ew -- and never remember that Philip Morris owns a beer company when I am out drinking), and reading Food Politics makes me feel like I should boycott every food corporation evar -- which is obviously not practical; Nestlé might be worth the effort, though.

Back to the yogurt: Its ingredients list says, "kosher gelatin."  *stabs*  The web tells me that "Some Kosher gelatins are made with agar-agar, most are not."  I was gonna phase out yogurt at some point in my attempts to approximate veganism (sidenote: anyone have non-dairy milk-like beverages they love?) but it looks like after I finish the yogurt I have I won't be getting any more.  I knew gelatin was used in jello and marshmallows (which I thus refuse to eat) and some photo emulsion and swallowable tablets (which I'm less scrupulous about avoiding) and some sweets (which labels I try to remember to check) but I totally hadn't realized it was in so many food products.  Guess I'm gonna have to be much more conscientious about reading labels.

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Today, lunabee34 wrote:

My birthday is tomorrow, and in honor of this blessed day *g*, I wanna start a meme--the I Love My Friends Meme. It seems like a lot more wank than usual has been floating around lj and lots of people have been feeling down or ill or just not as available as usual, like me. So to celebrate my birthday, tell your flist how much they mean to you. If you've got a huge flist, split it up over a few days or even weeks, but tell your fandom friends how much they've enriched your lives.

Leaving aside the problematic generalization of "fandom friends" (I know various people on LJ whom I knew through meatspace first, many of whom are not at all fannish), I have recurrent angst (not quite accurate, but the best word I could come up with) about the fact that I have various people on my flist whom I don't really feel connected to.  There are many people I don't communicate with that often but whom I still consider friends (and I would hope the feeling is mutual) but there are also people whom I find myself wondering, "Why do I still read this person?"  This leads to ponderments about why people have me friended and also about what the heck I want in friends.  I don't care all that much about people's personal lives until I'm invested in them as people, so I've got nothing as for why people (who aren't previously invested in relationship with me) still have me friended.  As for what I want in people, the only thing I've been able to come up with is that I want people I can have discussions with. And I'm gonna stop now before this turns really negative, as that would be even less in the spirit of what Lorraine wanted.

So, we were in Shakespeare class talking about all the homosocial stuff in Coriolanus and Prof. Oram talked about how he prefers to use the term homosocial rather than homosexual for this play since the homosexual desire gets sublimated into other behavior, though he wasn't going to say anything silly (his word) like that Shakespeare wasn't interested in men since most the sonnets are to a man and he recommended Bruce Smith's Homosexual Desire in Renaissanance England :)

We continued discussion of the omgliekwhoa 4.5 and finished the play and there's the tragedy of the end and Prof. Oram was talking about how Aufidius is calculating from the very beginning of the union and it was making me sad. I was reminded of Emma and i talking recently about old skool Charles/Erik (Professor X and Magneto of the X-Men universe) and debating if it is the most tragic relationship evar. Canon narrative is of them on violently opposed sides, but back in the day they were very close friends, so you have this deeply tender relationship that you know even before you begin reading it is going to end tragically. I am in fact highly inclined to not read the pairing because it is so depressing. The only comparable relationship i can think of is if one did what Smallville is doing: have Clark and Lex be friends back in the day. But i don't think it's canon in any 'verse that they were friends back in the day. In X-Men it very much is.

Anyway, so class discussion was good but meanwhile part of my brain was thinking about all the work i hadn't done the past couple days and debating deferring grad school for 2 years to bartend and massage school. And then i got back my "But What If You Don't Like It?: The Role of Jaques in As You Like It" paper with the following comment accompanying the grade: "This is a very good rewrite, careful, independent and genuinely thoughtful. It's also a pleasure to read --- something important when one writes about comedy. I think you're a little hard on Jaques at the end of the play -- what he says to the various lovers is playful and generous -- but this is really good work. I think you might submit it for an English Dept. prize this spring."

And then i saw Danne, which was lovely.

And i had breakfast, which hadn't happened in days.

UMass discussion was good. We talked a lot about drugs, as has become usual. We also talked about religion, including the Lilith midrash and the theocratic nature of Tibet. Also from discussion: the editor of Maxim graduated from UMass with a Comp-Lit major; should Dunkin' Donuts have lox?; Hitler; Pox: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis. And i got an extension on my paper.

I finally made myself start on my DSS paper. Realizing that it was a 6-8 rather than 8-10 page assignment was a pleasant surprise. But yeah, way to go having no bloody idea what i'm doing. *wants so badly to work on the Buffy/Bible/UPenn paper instead of all my real homework*

Grief counselor at tea today, so upon his arrival we all exited, with relative grace, and ended up having a hall party outside my door (since my door is across from the stairwell) and i learned that Corona is in fact not bad beer.

Lez made me go to ("The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe") mocktail. I wore my sparkly dress and my hot boots. My new theory is that entire purpose of a mocktail (besides the food and entertainment) is everyone dressing up pretty so we can all admire the pretty and compliment each other a bajillion times.

The Smith Vibes and Brown's Bear Necessities performed. The Bears weren't bad, but they weren't all that good either. And the Vibes were way hotter. However, "inspired by the Vibes," the Bears did Sarah McLachlan's "Ice Cream" (which the Vibes had done in their set) and the soloist was this cute little guy whom i hadn't noticed before (and when he made announcements later he so had a Doyle-Irish accent) and i was all aflutter during the whole thing. And they did Bruce Springsteen's "Streets of Philadelphia" which then the Vibes did in their second set -- "inspired" by the Bears, of course.

It's bad that i was listening to John Mayer's "No Such Thing" and lyrics like they love to tell you "stay inside the lines," but something's better on the other side made me all gayly asquee. The performative little Asian man did Paula Abdul's "Straight Up" and there was a synchronized dance routine in the background and it's hard to not get a gay vibe from that and i loved it.

pardalis05 says my house is the best on campus second only to her own :) And the hot chocolate was declared "sex in a cup." It was from that (not so new anymore) chocolate place on Green Street that people keep recommending to me, so i have decided that finally purchasing myself a hot chocolate there will be my reward to myself when i finish this semester.

I went upstairs around 10:30 with the theory of getting some work done now that the party was over. I took off my shoes and put on slippers and went to go to the bathroom and then there was a party in my hall and that finally ended *cough* around 4:30. Yeah platonic Cat-cuddling and conversation with a rotating cast of characters. Though now of course the odds of my actually getting substantial work done on evol paper on Saturday go way down since, ya know, sleep and all.

Reminder to self: Go to The Mysteries of Chris Van Allsburg exhibit over Jterm.

I got a River/Jayne ficlet over on serenity_santa! (Located here.) I haven't read it yet, but ::loves on the fact of its very existence::

Also: merrylittleelf made icons for everyone in btvs_santa. I got a Kate/Lilah one. ::hearts:: (I also love the ones for tis_nat and thomasina75.)

Moving back to the gay subtext discussion which opened this entry:

Thanks to antheia for this Brokeback Mountain piece about Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger.

Not homoerotic, just boggling: Christopher Walken used to not look terrifying

Everyone has of course heard about the Alabama lawmaker who wants to ban all the gay books. Speaking of homoerotic subtext: *hearts on Jesse Walker*

People keep linking to this New Yorker piece about the anti-Kinsey folk. It contains such gems as Reisman also endorses a book called "The Pink Swastika," which challenges the "myths" that gays were victimized in Nazi Germany. What i was struck by, particularly since i had seen it referenced by an LJ-er as "Further proof that the Right has gone utterly bonkers" was the amount of ink spilled on her anti-(child) pornography work. Porn is one of those issues that so amusingly splits the "Right" and the "Left" and by splits of course i also mean unites. There are people on both sides who oppose it (you're exploiting the vulnerable, you're degrading sexuality, etc.) and there are people on both sides who support it (women should be free to flaunt their sexuality, people should be free to do whatever they want provided they aren't hurting other people, etc.) and obviously the positions are often nuanced (with both Right and Left pro-porn folk wanting women to engage in sex work because they want to not because they are forced to due to poverty, for example).

Linking to this Boston Globe piece, Glenn Reynolds quips, "Somebody should make a documentary on this." Yes, this is my political-diversity-in-the-academy hobby horse. Will be interesting if i ever get a professorship and get to be That Professor instead of That Student. Full text of the article (complete with links) located for posterity behind ( the cut )