Dear lonely, neglected blog,

Here are some things I'm loving lately.

This article:

"How To Talk To Little Girls"

This music video:

And this quote:

"I remember one morning getting up at dawn, there was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling? And I remember thinking to myself: So, this is the beginning of happiness. This is where it starts. And of course there will always be more. It never occurred to me it wasn't the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment. Right then. " ––Michael Cunningham, The Hours 

Become Someone Else

via

Isn't this a clever advertisement for reading?

I am so excited for justforfun reading this summer.

So far, my list includes 

finishing:

Freedom

Kaaterskill Falls

The Last Report on Miracles At Little No Horse

(maybe) Paradise 

Also:

The Road

East of Eden 

Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling

Falling Toward Heaven

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love 

Food Rules: An Eater's Manual 

Mere Christianity 

The English Patient 

In All Their Animal Brilliance 

Fahrenheit 451

The Lighthouse 

July, July

And that's all for now. Any suggestions? 

Final Countdown

Fourteen Days.

Twenty-One Days.

Twenty-Four Days. 

And it feels so good. 

Mostly. 

First and third images via weheartit. 

Words

Stephen Fry on why I will never love my usage class:

You Shouldn't Have

Some gifts, good gifts say 

I thought of you 

But plenty of others say

I thought I was thinking of you

but really

I was thinking of me

--This American Life #428

Nancy Updike, you can host any week.

And "struggly" is now a word in my book. 

Thursday Night Thoughts

Loving this song:

Wanting a brown-er version of this hair (someday I may work up the courage): 

And wondering if this blog will ever become more than a carefully orchestrated sliver-of-myself.

So much depends upon...

1/2 teaspoon of baking soda. 

Or rather, the lack thereof can render five-dozen cookies completely mushy and inedible. 

There goes an entire bag of chocolate chips and an hour of my Sunday evening.

At least the apartment smells nice. 

Missing the Days...

When I slept more than six hours at night. 

And I woke up in time to apply eyeshadow instead of just a barely noticeable trace of mascara.

And I changed out of the shirt I slept in.

And I did all of my poli. sci. reading.

And I stayed awake during tutorials.

Or at least thought of something insightful to say in my rhetorical-analysis-induced sleep?

Ohhh midtermsresearchpaperspaperspaperspapers you kill me.

BUT the best part of Valentine's Day is gummy cinnamon hearts. 

By far.

Face It. You Lost It.

So I left my favorite waterbottle in my Poli Sci class last week. The teal plastic one with the press-button flip top. It may be a little scratched and probably leaks BPA (whatever that means), but I've had it forever (four years?) and it's been everywhere with me. All over the US and UK. And maybe, though I can't say for sure, Vietnam.

I keep hoping it will turn up. But then I hear D.W.'s voice in my head. You know when she narrates the "Arthur's Lost Library Book" episode? When Arthur loses the library's latest scare-your-pants-off club book and everyone's mad at him because they all want to read it? Remember? No?

Oh okay.



Skip to 1:50. Or you could just watch the entire episode and relive some blissful childhood memories.

Tuesday Tedium

Tuesdays are the worst.

8 am staff meetings followed by class and work till 6:45.

(With several short breaks that are usually spent skimming far-too-long readings. Sometimes a 20 minute nap.)

Now I have two papers to write along with plenty more reading to catch up on. But I just want to make cookies and watch Portlandia videos. Or both, preferably. 

*The following is mostly just prewriting for an essay. Feel free to ignore.*

We just finished Fugitive Pieces in my Women's Lit. class. Everyone seemed to love it, but I didn't so much.  Well, I can certainly appreciate it on a sentence level.  The prose is remarkably lyrical and could certainly be classified as prose-poetry.  Michael's metaphors and imagery are truly evocative––surprising yet precise.  Although, they do become somewhat...distracting at times.  I tend to agree with one critic who labeled her writing "over-accessorized."  But what Michaels seriously lacks, in my opinion, is character development.  Maybe this seems insensitive, but Jakob is far too maudlin and well...pathetic for my liking. No not my liking. My understanding.  While I think it is an interesting idea to explore the effects of the Holocaust on the second generation that never experienced the ghettoes or concentration camps, it's just not believable for me. Yes, Jakob lost his family at a very young age, but Athos becomes his family.  I don't understand his habit of comparing every woman he meets to the sister he hardly knew? For fifty years? And his claim that the most important events in his life are the ones he never even witnessed? I don't buy it.  Not because it isn't possible. Michaels just doesn't make it believable.  She's too tied up in describing the exact shade of the Mediterranean or the whisper-weight of white linen on olive skin.  But most troubling, or at least incomprehensible, is Jakob's sudden healing.  After decades of self pity, a few pages of sexual exploration with a woman half his age rectifies that? Really? I suppose he calls it love. But Michaels doesn't prove it.  What the novel lacks is Eliot's objective correlative––a concrete representation of and explanation for Jakob's extreme melancholy. (Which is somewhat ironic because Michaels references this concept several times.)

That's all I suppose. I don't think I'll actually end up using any of this though. It certainly doesn't answer any of the far too leading (in my opinion) "discussion" questions.

January Highlights:

clementines. 

AND this video:

It's been a long month. Here's to a healthier, more productive and warmer (?) February.

Maybe some more blog action too.

No promises.

print via 

Feet.

I had this (a portion of my toenail removed from the root):

(I could have picked a much more graphic image)

done this morning for at least the sixth time in the past few years and I still can't feel my toe. I do however have a Vicodin prescription to fill for when the feeling returns. Also, I have to pick up orthodics tomorrow and get an x-ray of the bone deformity growing on my left foot. I can also look forward to some achilles-tendon-lengthening surgery in the next few years. So that's fun. At least I have an excuse for my extreme overpronation and ridiculous looking stride. But much to my brothers' disappointment, I'm not sure I'll be cross-country skiing anytime soon.

Christmas Lights Are Pretty

And this fireplace looks cozy.

Also, snow isn't too bad when you don't have to drive in it.

Or walk to class in it.

Or touch it in general.

I would love to see snowy London.

{all images via wehearit}

It's Christmas So We'll Stop

In two days. TWO DAYS.

I wish I had the motivation to study for my Bio 100 and Elang finals, but I really don't right now. Two consecutive 7 am finals sucked that out of me.

But I am currently very much looking forward to:
-Sleeping for more than five hours at a time
-Finally compiling my London scrapbook
-Running again

-Making homemade marshmallows (pumpkin? egg-nog flavored?)
-DRIVING
-Reading for fun
-Visiting Tacoma's brand new H&M

And that's all for now. That should get me through two more finals. This song also helps:

YouTube Gems (or why five-page essays take me six hours)

This adds a whole new dimension to the only-slightly-overplayed Christmas classic:



Haha and this. I don't even know where to start. Or whether to laugh. Or cringe. Or... dance? Although several lines are quite problematic from both doctrinal and feminist perspectives, it's still pretty catchy.

Home Stretch

Thanksgiving really is such a tease. A five-day taste of freedom followed by a prompt return to three weeks of papers, finals and sleepless nights in the library. Kind of a freezing hell. Is it bad that I've come to associate the Christmas season with finals? "Last Christmas" now brings memories of test anxiety, sore throats and rushing to the airport with a massive sleep debt.

However, my end-of-semester to-do list isn't looking too bad. It's considerably shorter than others I have seen. All I really have to do over the next few weeks is:

-Write and polish Shakespeare research paper
-Complete Shakespeare "essence" final project
-Shakespeare midterm
-Attend two bio lectures and write two responses
-Edit and turn-in creative writing final masterwork
-Class class class
-Read read read
-Plan Writing Center Christmas party
-ELANG Final
-Marriage & Family Final
-Bio Final

And that's really all I can think of at the moment.  If I wasn't working this semester, I think it would have been my easiest one yet. Including Freshman "honors" classes that are basically high school in disguise.  Though I'm sure many other little things will come up. The only real problem is that the majority of the items on this list must be completed in the next three or four days.

At least I can sit back and watch this in my Elang class at the moment. (Did you know a "small language" becomes extinct every two weeks?) And eat chocolate provided by the instructor. And fine-tune my Christmas list.

I really want to go to India. And take Chinese again. And walk to class without risking falling flat on my face.

html

Is not my best medium. I haven't tried so hard to decode (encode?) it since myspace. Who knew creating a custom banner could be so difficult? Where's microsoft paint when you need it.

I think I just wasted an hour of my life. At least I got paid for it.

Procrastination Sensation.

Welllp. I've done just about everything one can do to avoid writing my bio paper on the relationship between water temperature and algae (algal?) growth in Provo River. Including:

-3 hour nap

-Shower

-Blow dry and style hair

-Clean room

-Make dinner (wheat penne with roasted vegetables and grated parmesan)

-Clean kitchen

-Compile Christmas playlist

-Check Facebook, Gmail and all the blogs I routinely stalk

-Check blogs I rarely even visit

-Double-check Facebook, Gmail and blogs

-Clean kitchen

And I'm running out of ideas. This would be a whole lot easier if I wasn't making quite literally all of my data up. And if I could figure out how to make charts in Pages. And if I could actually find some relevant, peer-reviewed sources. Maybe I'll make those up too? That seems too obvious. Oh well. I'll just restart Sufjan's Christmas album and try again. Last assignment before Thanksgiving!

p.s. This is quite nice.

I see you stir the fog around.

This song shuffled onto my ipod this afternoon and I immediately deemed it the perfect first-day-of-November tune. A little lonely and foreboding. Yet a comfortable brand of melancholy.

It has taken me awhile to adjust to his voice, but I'm warming up to it. Kind of like Joanna Newsom. After a year of cringing at her occasionally screeching vocals, I'm learning to appreciate her for the lyrical genius she really is. And her voice isn't half bad either. If you're new to Joanna I'd start with this:

Mincing up the morning, slightly bored

I hate when people steal my favorite napping couches.

(She's not even sleeping.)

And vending machine dinners.

(Processed strawberry danish?)

And 12 hour days on campus.

But work is fun.

And I'll be 21 in two days.

Also, if anyone knows how to embed song links in blogger with yahoo media player will they pleaseeee enlighten me? I've wasted far too many homework-hours trying to figure this out.

That's all. I'll just be attempting a Bon Iver-induced nap in very noisy hallway.