isle of gramarye (the crystal goblet and the wine)

-Draft of first term paper complete, revised a couple of times
-Work desperately needed on research prospectus for the second; momentum lacking
-Yuletide canon in need of consumption stat.

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Reading about hobbits again. Why do i put myself through this? they never fail to make me cry a deal too much. But then again, they also make me happier than anything at the same time. Odd little paradoxical things. I just can't seem to resist them - they pull at me so. With their love and devotion and stubbornness and silly small ways of thinking about things. <3 <3 <3.

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So we just possibly, like, ate all the episodes of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood that are currently up on Hulu - through episode 30. In not very many days.

( thinky thoughts )

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I think I'm going to have to just finish these term papers. I've got 2-3 weeks till they're due, but they're driving me crazy with anxiety, and I think I'm going to try to just pound them out and then be done with it. I'll be more sane!

Term Papers: It's What's For Thanksgiving Dinner?

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Restless Cooking Tally: one for, one against.

Tried to use getting-wrinkly leftovers of the huuuuge bag of apples The Boy's mom gave us for a nice baked-apples-in-butter-sauce, and. No. Not sure if the apples were beyond salvation, or if I did something stupid, or if the pan wasn't quite clean or something like that - but it tasted funky, and down the drain it went!

Assuaged by bruised sense of feminine mystiquitude by sauteeing ground beef and yellow peppers with a really good sweet mongolian sauce knockoff from the grocery, which I then ate in a yummy warm burrito. Much better.

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I don't think I'm going to be able to see Avatar. The link goes to a James Cameron interview with playboy. Here, have a quote:

"[Guys]won’t be able to control themselves. They will have actual lust for a character that consists of pixels of ones and zeros. You’re never going to meet her, and if you did, she’s 10 feet tall and would snap your spine .... Right from the beginning I said, 'She’s got to have tits,' even though that makes no sense because her race, the Na’vi, aren’t placental mammals."

!!!!

Oh James Cameron no!

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Sad today. And tired.

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It's been like fandom party central these last couple of days, between the AO3 opening and Yuletide and the shiny new Merlin ep and just wow. I heart this thing of ours so hard. It makes me so happy that between the AO3 and Dreamwidth and Fanlore we're really coming to be in possession of our own arts, and my inner cultural historian is also really thrilled that we've begun constructing our edifice, making our mark a little more indelible.

Erroneously gendered contemporaneous reviews of George Eliot just make it all the better. Sporfle.

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YULETIDE ASSIGNMENT WHUT HOMG SQUEE!

(my Yule Goat letter is here, just to bump it up again. homg.)

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Ho wow! I has an AO3 account!

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Ugh. I'm at once immensely tired of my coursework, and feeling really unprepared for the end of term. I keep psyching myself out over not much really, but somehow since it's grad school it feels like it's all Important and Hard and Scary.

The ideal length of time for a class is an interesting question - I was talking to someone in my cohort about how our 14/15 week semester feels too long to me, and she said that on the contrary, she'd really prefer at least 17 weeks. I think I'd like 11/12, a little longer than my undergrad trimesters, but still brief enough to never turn into a slog.

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I spent all last night writing my Senators and Representatives - I'd been considering changing my voter registration to Indiana, but that fucker Stupak is keeping me in Michigan so that I can strike out against him in any way that I can. Man makes me ashamed to be a Michigander, which fact I informed him of in the very pissy email I sent off. Planned Parenthood has a good mass-write-Obama thing organized, so I did that too. But my hopes are not very high.

Bill Clinton thinks we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good? This isn't the good. If it was just not helping with abortion access maybe, but this bill would make things even worse than they are now. And abortion rights are too fragile right now, after the chipping-away that's been diminishing them for oh pretty much my entire lifespan, to let this happen. I don't care so much about the perfect, but I'll fight back against the atrocious.

I just wish I had any hope that fighting will make a difference.

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Yay yuletide signup! I had such a hard time winnowing down fandoms this year, and I ended up offering way more than I usually do. But I couldn't help it; they were all so tasty.

Dear Yule Goat,

Know this first thing: you are so awesome, I don't even.

( once again as in olden days, happy golden days of yore )

Rest in peace, Claude Lévi-Strauss.

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(I will start making eeping noises about yuletide signups once I've had the chance to do some notebooking and figure out what on earth I'm going to offer and request this year. November already! It snuck up on me this year.)

For anyone who speaks German - or for anyone who's a Hoffmann nerd - is there a standard English translation of "Nussknacker und Mausekonig"? One that's trustworthy? I'm making plans to take the Baby to the University ballet next month, and I wanted to beef up on the Hoffmann story. Besides which, I remember liking it a great deal as a kid, and it would be fun to read again. But from my fiddling around on the net, it looks like there's a bunch of "based on"s and not very many faithful translations. And I don't want a kiddie version!

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hokay, guise. tell me why I should be watching White Collar - if indeed I should be. You can also tell me why I shouldn't.

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I would be fascinated to see an analysis of historical race - as opposed to historiographic race - then-thoughts, not now-looking-back-at-then-thoughts - in Merlin. Using the non-genetic theories of skin pigmentation - anyone who lived in a hot place would look like that eventually! - and maybe even looking at Celtic Fringe stuff.

I'd even love to see a historiographic reading from someone in the UK re: the Celtic Fringe thing. How does the Irish Morgana look through contemporary UK pop culture? And what would her status as an oppressed person be, historically speaking, in relation to Gwen's?

(Obviously, I'm a white girl living in the US. Race here has a particularly, um, hardcore history here. And also obviously, a lot of the people in this fandom are both chromatic and white people living State-side, so our historiography of Gwen and Morgan sort of has to come from the viewpoint of our history. But I know enough about medieval European race theory to know that I don't know much, and I do think it would be cool to read the show through that lens, as well as the one drawn from our own contemporary culture/life experience.)

eta: if this is problematic wittering, feel free to tell me off. I'm pretty much pulling this out of nowhere, and that subconscious nowherespace does tend to be where the icky programming resides.

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