I think you're confused

Subject:	book meme!
Time:	11:08 pm.

Grabbed from

deepsix and

dine.

1. Do you snack while you read? If so, favorite reading snack?
Not any more than I usually do, really.

2. Do you tend to mark your books as you read, or does the idea of writing in books horrify you?
It used to horrify me (seriously, my first AP English class where I realized I'd have to mark up my book to keep track of stuff--traumatizing) but years of being an English major specifically and a student generally have made it much less so. I don't tend to mark books for pleasure reading, though, unless it's something I'm having a hard time getting a handle on, though.

3. How do you keep your place while reading a book? Bookmark? Dog-ears? Laying the book flat open?
I do all of these--I leave it flat if I'm just leaving it for a minute, bookmark it if I'm leaving it for a while, and dog-ear pages if I'm throwing it in my purse and I know the bookmark will fall out.

4. Fiction, non-fiction, or both?
Both, but fiction a lot more frequently.

5. Hard copy or audiobooks?
Hard copy. I'm thinking about downloading some audio books now that I'm working a job where I can listen to my Ipod, since talking tends to keep me interested but not distracted, where as music sometimes kind of zones me out.

6. Are you a person who tends to read to the end of chapters, or are you able to put a book down at any point?
I can generally stop anywhere, but I tend to re-read to find my place a lot.

7. If you come across an unfamiliar word, do you stop to look it up right away? Write it down to look it up later? Just try to infer what it means from the rest of the sentence, and keep going?
I always mean to write it down and look it up later, but I usually end up too wrapped up to actually do it. I'm pretty good at figuring it out from context, though.

8. What are you currently reading?
David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, although only in very short bursts; JD Salinger's Seymour: An Introduction (I tried and failed to convince Telis that no, really, Salinger's other work is totally about how people totally missed the point of Catcher in the Rye, which was don't be like this, and it got me interested in re-reading the Glass family stories); and I just finished re-reading David Sedaris' When You Are Engulfed in Flames. I also have The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume II next to my bed with a bookmark in the middle of "The Valley of Fear", but who knows when I'll get back to that. Same with Foucault's The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, which I'm trying to re-read because damn, it was a nice idea to study it in a women's lit class, but a week is really not enough time to have any clue wtf Foucault is going on about.

9. What is the last book you bought?
I have no idea.

10. Are you the type of person that only reads one book at a time or can read more than one at a time?
I'm pretty much always reading more than one.

11. Do you like re-reading books?
Yes! There are some books that I can only read once I can no longer remember every single thing that happens (I have a pretty good memory for books), but for the most part books, like movies, are better the second (and third and fourth and fifth) time, so you can catch what you missed the last time.

Comments: Read 2 or Add Your Own.

Subject:	stuff
Time:	9:07 pm.

1) I'm getting a new laptop tomorrow! Right now I'm on my mom's laptop because she took pity on my cramp-ridden state and my desire to be on the internet flat on my back like god intended rather than crouching in an uncomfortable chair like satan desires, and sweet god have I missed this. It'll be nice to have my own laptop and my own data on my own hard drive again.

2) My nephew is staying with us for the weekend! And oh my god, he's a giant. Right now I have to stand on tiptoe to hug him, and every time I see him he's taller. Chris (nephew) and I will also be sharing sleeping space this weekend because my friend Kelly has been staying with us for about a week. She's been on the couch, but now that Chris is here we'll be playing musical beds--her in my room and me and Chris in the living room on the couch and an air mattress, since we both sleep with the tv on and she doesn't. I'm glad both of them are here because I love them both dearly, but oh man, I was really looking forward to a good night's sleep in my own bed tonight. CRAMPS, I HATE YOU SO MUCH.

3) I actually probably would have given my bed up tonight anyway because it's Kelly's birthday! \o/ And to celebrate, she's taking care of financial aid stuff at her school. Ugh, worst luck, right? Tomorrow she gets a birthday shopping spree (well, more of a jag, really. what is the small version of a spree?) courtesy of me, though, and I made her birthday blueberry muffins as per her request, so hopefully it'll be a nice night for her when she gets home, anyway.

4) Sort of out of place on this list, but I realized earlier today, on a break from work while I was outside smoking and reading David Sedaris' essay about quitting smoking, that one of the reasons this whole personal public LJ/my lj is my personal space/my lj is my house thing is so weird to me is because I'm a smoker, and especially because I'm a smoker who used to take public transportation all the damn time. Because for the majority of people, how you behave in public--the ways in which you limit your personal expression and inhabit your own personal space so as not to infringe on that of others--is pretty well trained into you from childhood. It's really only when you get a socially unacceptable habit like, say, smoking, that you really have to think about how your personal choices can infringe on that of other people in a public setting. (When other people infringe on your choices, it is, of course, noticeably rude. Turn down your damn ipod, kid sitting next to me on the bus, I can hear your music even though you're listening to headphones! And stop taking up so much legroom while you're at it, your dick doesn't actually need that much space.)

As a smoker, I'm constantly aware that my personal space isn't just my own when I'm in public--I share it with other people, and my personal space and personal choices can infringe on other people's. I'm legally allowed to smoke on a public street, next to a bus stop, but I don't--I find a reasonably secluded place and smoke there. Because not only is it kind of rude to inflict my personal choices on other people just because they wandered onto the same street corner that I'm standing on, even if I was there first and it was their choice to come stand next to me, but for all I know, that person giving me dirty looks when I stand close to her with my cigarette just doesn't feel like having an asthma attack today.

I'm not using this as a metaphor for warning wank. (And really, my feelings on public journals as part of public space extend to all parts of those journals, not just the fanfic section.) I'm just saying, personal (you) and public (the world) aren't discrete concepts--they intersect all the time, every time you go outside and interact with the world, and it's interesting to me that so many people in fandom do regard the two as discrete rather than intersecting, especially since so many of us do choose to air our personal opinions in a public setting despite the many options we're given to make our personal space actually private instead of just personal.

5) I know I still have comments to reply to--I'll be getting to them tomorrow. Tonight I'm going to take some midol and read some fanfic, because I think I just used up all the coherency that I have left. (And "coherent" might actually be a little generous for what I just wrote.)

ETA: Chris just brought me soda and a kitten. MY nephew is the BEST nephew. :D

UPDATE: My nephew just gave me a twenty minute long backrub. BEST. NEPHEW. EVER.

Comments: Read 2 or Add Your Own.

Time:

11:30 pm.

I am so glad that

gabrielleabelle made this post so that I don't have to. I've been too tired lately to really frame my words well and to want to argue with strangers, so my post probably would have been basically:

1) YOUR PUBLIC JOURNAL IS NOT YOUR FUCKING HOUSE!
2) No, seriously, am I the only person whose journal gives her the option between Private and Public posting? Like, I mean, calling it that and everything, in very clear and specific language? Is everyone else stuck choosing between House and Mausoleum, or do they just think Public really means private, like the British school system or something?
3) Did everybody forget how the internet works?
4) Because seriously, YOUR PUBLIC JOURNAL IS NOT YOUR FUCKING HOUSE. I don't know anyone who would deliberately leave their house unlocked, knowing that a bunch of people are leaving fliers around town with their address listed as a cool place to party (fliers that are often received by the house-owner with great enthusiasm), and then act surprised and appalled to find a bunch of people dancing in their living room.

And then maybe a link I made to that other post I made about how no, really, Public means exactly what it says on the tin and so no, your public journal is not actually your secret diary OR YOUR GODDAMN HOUSE. I really hope I don't have to make one of these every year.

Sorry for all the caps, but holy shit does this "I refuse to take responsibility for the things I publicly post" crap piss me off.

Comments: Read 18 or Add Your Own.

Time:

4:49 am.

So, in an awesome new iteration of my TOTALLY FUCKED sleep schedule, I've been going to sleep at around 2-4 in the afternoon, and waking up at around 10 at night to 1 in the morning. /o\ Tomorrow I have work, though, so hopefully having that structure back will get me back into semi-normal patterns because dude, this is just not working for me.

Also sweet lord do I miss my laptop. Last week it just decided, kaput, I am done working--hard drive's probably fine but the screen is dead, so my dad's friend is grabbing my data and then I'm probably getting a new laptop. For now I'm stuck on the main computer in the uncomfiest chair in the world, and since both my job and at least one of my leisure activities involve staring at computers and uncomfy chairs, I predict fun back problems in my future. If anyone's wondering why I've been crankier than usual this week, wank is not the only reason. (Although damn, has that not helped.)

And now, I'm going to read fic for an hour or so before I go to work. Oh, adulthood, why did no one ever tell me you'd be so much like my teen years?

Comments: Read 6 or Add Your Own.

Subject:	have to find a middle way, a better way of living
Time:	9:13 pm.

I love looking at people's icons, but I don't always *get* them--I often wonder stuff like, "Who's that guy?" or "Where's that quote from?" but I tend not to ask, for various reasons. Here are my icons. Pick one (or more!) you're curious about, and I'll try to explain it. (stolen from my dear

girlneedsagun)

I only have fifteen and I'm still trying to overhaul my icons so a lot of them are still bandom right now, but I'm sure there's at least one or two head-scratchers in there. Take a look.

Also, guess who has two thumbs and just made some delicious whole wheat blueberry muffins? This girl! They also have nearly a cup of sugar in them, but damn I love this recipe so much I don't even care. They're not quite as good as my first batch made with all-purpose, but I think that's mostly because I didn't have as much margarine as I would have liked to put in. Next up: more raspberry cake for my daddy, who thoughtfully bought me two cartons and whose eyes lit up when I said the words "raspberry cake". (Still the best damn thing I've ever baked, I swear. I ate most of that thing myself in like three days.) Still trying to un-fuck my sleep schedule, though, so when I get home I usually just scoop cat boxes, do dishes, vacuum and pick up a little bit, and then crash. I only gained the motivation to make muffins because otherwise my huge carton of blueberries was gonna go bad pretty soon.

Also, the new Placebo album has officially grown on me. I loooove it so and I've been pretty much listening to it non-stop for the past few days--very motivating for work, especially "Bright Lights". And I just bought tickets to see Tori next month! \o/ No idea what the seats are like since I've never been in the venue before, but even the cheapest came to 100 bucks after ticketmaster charges, so no way was I trying for better.

In other spending-money-on-myself news, I'm trying to decide whether to pony up for a Disneyland ticket so I can accompany Amber on her birthday. On the one hand: friend's birthday, Disneyland. On the other: I just spent 200 bucks in one day (Tori tickets, getting one damn half of my mouth cleaned and antibiotics squirted on my gums) and I'm going to be paying fifty or so for my dad's father's day present tattoo. (The father's day tattoo thing is also a strike against Disneyland: I haven't decided whether or not to go watch him get it. I'm afraid it will awake my craving for a new tattoo, and not only am I trying not to spend money on myself for a while, I also haven't decided where I want to get it yet.) So Amber, if you're reading this, I've been meaning to text you and I'll give you a definitive answer probably on Friday.

Um...the end?

Comments: Read 4 or Add Your Own.

Time:

7:37 pm.

Ganked from

rhiorhapsody, because I'm boooored.

Name your 20 absolutely favorite couples (het/slash/canon/fanon) and ask people to see what trends they notice about your couples. Try to pick different fandoms.

1. Pete/Patrick (Bandom--come on, you knew this one would be on here)
2. Pete/Ashlee (Bandom--this one also had to be on here)
3. Corey/Shawn (Boy Meets World)
4. Roger/Peter (Dawn of the Dead 1978)
5. Nikki/Pamie (Times Square)
6. Willow/Oz (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
7. Zoe/Wash (Firefly)
8. River/Simon (Firefly)
9. Britney/Christina (Popslash--yep, I still maintain fantasies of Christina swooping in and rescuing Britney in her white limousine)
10. McClane/Farrell (Live Free or Die Hard)
11. Dom/Brian (The Fast and the Furious--I still have not seen the new movie and it hurts me inside)
12. Megan/Graham (But I'm a Cheerleader)
13. Richard/Justin (Murder By Numbers)
14. Pauline/Juliet (Heavenly Creatures)
15. Rynn/Mario (The Little Girl who Lives Down the Lane--no one will know this one, but I love them really a lot)
16. Sawyer/Juliet (Lost--;__;)
17. Connor/Murphy (The Boondock Saints)
18. Brian/Curt (Velvet Goldmine)
19. Heroin Bob/Trish (SLC Punk)
20. Jackie/Hyde (That '70s Show--they're syndicated a lot and I don't have a job right now so I've been watching a lot of this show, and it's reminded me of how much I adored them as a couple)

Damn, this was harder than I thought. I'm such a multishipper, or at least not a die-hard OTP-er. There are only a few couples I can think of where they must be a couple or else there will be problems, so rather than my "absolutely favorite" couples these are "a bunch of couples I love a lot right now because I've been watching/thinking about their source texts". Also as my own observation, it's weird to see how much being in LJ fandom has changed my fic-writing habits, if not my pairing preferences--when I was still a "feral fan" and in my early days of LJ, I wrote a lot more het and femslash than I do now, even though I'd say I still love just as many het and f/f couples.

Bonus! Favorite threesomes:

1. Harry/Ginny/Tom Riddle (Harry Potter)
2. Isabelle/Theo/Matthew (The Dreamers)
3. Amy Blue/Jordan White/Xavier Red (The Doom Generation)
4. Gary/Valentino/Mary Carmen (The Velocity of Gary)

In other news, my kitten had her first visit to the vet! Poor thing had her claws clipped and came home shaking and hungry and very, very freaked out, but she's curled up in her habitual position by my knee now so I'm guessing she decided not to stay mad at me. She has really runny eyes, which was the first symptom of my cat Nermal having FIV, so I was very DDDD: about the whole thing and kind of freaked out as to what we would find, but apparently she's FIV-free, which means her mom and her sibs are as well! \o/ She did, however, have ear mites and apparently had a pretty bad liver infection (which is probably why she didn't eat anything for the longest time), but we have vitamins and medicine for her so she should be okay. Also I am down $285 bucks, so we'll be taking our other kitties to a much less expensive vet for their vaccinations (she cost extra because she had blood work done, of course, but it was $95 just for the office visit. Gah).

( recent-ish pics of the kittens )

ETA: Oh, and I forgot to say that even though I rarely see movies in theaters because it's damned expensive, man, I'm really fucking tempted to see the new Terminator movie even though I'm already pretty sure that:

-I will come out of it slashing the shit out of John Connor/robot dude (thanks for this useless and creepy kink, Sarah Connor Chronicles!)
-I will come out of it slashing the shit out of John Connor/his future dad (I don't really know who to blame for this--possibly SCC, too)
-I will come out of it angry at the way women are marginalized (from what I've heard there are two women and one of them is John Connor's pregnant girlfriend who obviously has to stay out of the way of all the actiony stuff)
-I will come out of it missing Sarah Connor like crazy
-I will come out of it pissed off that SCC was cancelled and that we didn't get a SCC movie, instead, and now never will

And yet...Terminator. Robots! Explosions! Action and adventure! I'll probably end up waiting until it's on cable, but still. I waaaant. :(

Comments: Read 2 or Add Your Own.

Time:

12:51 pm.

Here is a list of fandoms I've been reading fic for over the last, say, three days: Supernatural, Heroes, Veronica Mars, The OC, Star Trek (reboot and TOS). Not even really a lot, but dude, after being in bandom and pretty much only bandom being polyfandom again wears me the fuck out, especially since I still have monofandom tendencies--I marathon fic from one fandom, and then either find an author I like has written other fandoms or find a link on my flist to a fic from a different fandom and then switch tracks to marathoning that instead, and holy fuck, have I read a lot of fic lately. (Side note: there was never enough VMars Dick/Cassidy fic, man, never.)

In other news, last night I went over to my friend Shaunna's house to have dinner and play games with her, her boyfriend Sorin, and our friend Amber. You'd think a bunch of eighties babies would be at least semi-okay at 90s Trivial Pursuit, and yet you would be wrong--I'm pretty sure that game took three hours or so. Admittedly I'd been awake for 29 hours by the time we ended the game, Sorin didn't emigrate to Canada until the late 90s, and Shaunna and Amber both worked through the week and so probably weren't all that brain-awake either, but damn, man--that's some sad shit. Also all of us except Sorin turned 15/16 in 2000, so most of that shit, especially politics and technology, went right over our heads. Of course we all knew each other's questions, though. That's how it always goes in Trivial Pursuit--everyone else's question is always the question you totally would have gotten, while your own are completely incomprehensible.

Also I'm apparently going to Vegas for two days in June. /o\ I'm not even sure how it happened, really--Shaunna gave me the big puppy eyes that I thought I was immune to, and my mouth somehow said yes against my will. Apparently I can crash in her and Sorin's room, though, and they're just planning to hang around the pool at the hotel all day, so hopefully it won't end up being too expensive since I don't have a job yet. (I do have a possible, job, though--a friend of my parents recommended a position at a book store to me! I just need to give her the application, which can hopefully be done without me traveling down there.)

I also made a delicious raspberry cake--it was supposed to be blueberry, but the little store down my street for some reason doesn't carry them, so it ended up raspberry and so fucking delicious. Betty Crocker, you are my savior and my love. (Sidenote: I love my little grocery store down the street--12 oz. of raspberries and two mangoes for three fucking dollars. Om nom nom nom nom.) Of course, I didn't remember until after I left Shaunna's that I'm pretty sure Shaunna doesn't like raspberries. /o\ Oh well, at least my fam can have some nice cake for a few days. It's a really dense cake, since it would have been cake bars if I'd had a big enough baking pan, but sweet and soft and bursting with raspberries. I have no idea how I can make cake turn out this good, and yet consistently fail it up with cookies.

I've also been planning to treat myself with a 20 dollar Amazon used book shopping spree, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to be spending my cash on the new Tori Amos and Placebo cds instead, since I am SO FUCKING STOKED for both of them. Especially Placebo, since I've been mainlining all their cds for the last few weeks or so. Some day, I swear, I will see them perform. I'd like to see Tori again, too, the next time she tours, since I haven't seen one of her shows in probably...five years? Six? IDK, but way too long.

And that's the end of my babbling. :D

Comments: Read 6 or Add Your Own.

Subject:	update on my degree situation!
Time:	12:45 pm.

So, my prof very kindly gave me a B- instead of a C because my general performance in his class was so good, even though he was kind of disappointed in my final paper. (I mean, I had an extra month to write it, so it should have been awesome, but it was a difficult topic and I wrote most of it while panicking and going "oh my god, I can't do this" so it's not really surprising that it's not my best paper ever.) \o/

So I called my degree auditor who told me what to do, and also informed me that also apparently I'm missing the writing composition 3 requirement, which was fucking news to me because my counselor never told me. So I called my department counselor who told me that they only received one of my AP scores, which was the problem, since it was standing in for that requirement in my IGETC. Luckily I've taken a fuckton of English classes at UCLA (almost all English classes, really, except for a few LGBT Studies classes and a Comp Lit class) so she subbed one in, which should clear it up.

So now I just need to fax my degree candidacy form in and wait for them to bill me. That's kind of a problem because I don't actually have access to a fax machine--some of my friends do through work, but it would be kind of awkward asking them to do this for me on work time, and my mother does, but, um, she doesn't actually know that I screwed up this badly. There's a library in Azusa, but I don't know that they have a fax machine and I don't know if they're accessible by bus. I could mail it in, but that takes more time and I need to get this shit sewn up as soon as possible. Confessing to my mom may be my only option. DDD:

But, I'm getting my fucking degree, and that's the important thing. \o/ Yay for fixing my innumerable mistakes!

Comments: Read 14 or Add Your Own.

Subject:	So, stuff!
Time:	1:14 pm.

Baking

Let's see, in the last week or so I made another batch of chocolate chip cookies (still flatter than I'd like, but delicious and soft and chocolate-melty), a blackberry cobbler that I think is more cobbler-y than the first one I made (that is, the topping is soft and biscuity rather than more pie-crust like), and buttermilk pancakes. Apparently you can simulate buttermilk by adding milk to a tablespoon of lemon juice until it adds up to a cup, and then letting it sit for five minutes. They were a little burnt, but really really good. I kind of want to try more things but for a lot of them I'd need other ingredients, and I don't really want to walk down to the grocery store down the street, especially since it's starting to get hot.

Jobs and School

I just got two automated "we'll contact you" responses, and one "we'll keep you on file" from three different jobs, but all from the same employment recruiter. LOL. I haven't heard back about the two library jobs I was hoping for, unfortunately. :( Maybe it'll be Walmart for me after all.

In terms of school, my prof said he'd have my grade up by Monday, and it's now Thursday and I'm still waiting for it. I emailed him a few minutes ago to ask him to email me the grade directly if he's already submitted it, just in case there's something wrong with the grading website. I keep getting myself revved up to call the school and deal with whatever forms I need to fill out to (hopefully) get my ass graduated, but I can't do that without knowing whether I've passed his class.

Kittens

Pumpkin (the kitten my mom brought home) has been completely adopted by both the mom cat and her litter. He runs around with the black kitten and is getting nice and chubby. Pics as soon as I get new batteries for my camera.

I'm actually kind of worried about our gray stripey kitten. She's having some wicked diarrhea, and despite being almost eight weeks old, she's surviving entirely off her mom's milk, which she has to share with two other kittens. (My mom claims she's seen her eat kitten food a few times, but if so, it hasn't been lately.) She's also way thinner than the other kittens, even Pumpkin who's younger, and while she still runs and plays a good bit, she's starting to nap a lot more too and just doesn't seem very happy. I noticed the diarrhea but figured it would go away, but when she started getting more lethargic I checked the internet and it told me diarrhea in kittens is a big fucking deal and she needs to go to the vet immediately to be checked for worms. Unfortunately my parents are going to be in Vegas until Sunday. D: I'm hoping my little sis will be able to give me a ride to the vet today or tomorrow, because if not we'll have to wait until Monday. I'm keeping a close eye on her and making sure she drinks lots of water, though.

ETA: Possibly part of the "hot happy" thing was not getting enough attention, since the other two kittens tend to play more with each other. I've got her on my bed right now, happily attacking a little toy mouse and my fingers.

ETA 3: So, after examining the poop (yep, this is what I do with my days, people) of the mom cat as well as the babies, they definitely have some sort of worms. Possibly the "healthy" belly I'm seeing on two of the kittens is a potbelly from roundworms! Oh, joy. So I'll probably take in the black kitten and the grey stripey kittens, as well as poop from both of them and their mom, and then ask if they can give me a treatment for a mom and three kittens.

ETA 2: Jury duty

Dude, I totally forgot to talk about this! So I've been called up for jury duty next week in fucking Whittier, a city almost twenty miles away that I have never been to (and thus am almost guaranteed to get lost in). I called like a month back to try to get out of it, because hi, I do not drive, but I was told that I could only get out of it for extraordinary travel circumstances if I had to take three buses, not two. And I was so sure that I'd only have to take two buses (yep, "only" two and "only" a two hour trip--meaning really a three hour trip because local public transit sucks, and also I'd have to go early to compensate for late buses and getting off at the wrong stop) but looking at the trip planner right now, I would definitely have to take three buses. /o\ And of course it's too late now to call and go, "um, actually it is three buses, can I please not have to go?" All I can do is hope I don't actually get called in.

Comments: Read 2 or Add Your Own.

Time:

4:32 pm.

So, we have another new kitten. /o\ Apparently at my mom's work, some guy found a kitten in his engine block, and Mom decided to bring him home rather than entrust him to Animal Control because she was afraid he might be put down. He's probably five or six weeks, just a little younger than the kittens we have now, and he's the cutest little orange thing. Poor baby's totally starving--he's eating wet kitten food on my bedroom floor right now and pretty much stuffing himself.

I was hoping the two siblings would be adopted together, just because kittens are supposed to have other cats around in order to be well-socialized, but no chance will anyone take all three, unfortunately. Hopefully we can get someone who already has a cat to adopt one, at least.

In other news, my newest baking project was a cranberry-orange cake. It came out kind of bland at first because I didn't add as much sugar as the recipe called for but I made an orange juice and sugar glaze and it's really yummy now, at least I think so. According to my little sis, my cookies were "too floury" so I'm going to work on that this weekend. Anyway, I really need to figure out what's up with my camera, both so I can post kitty development (both the new little guy, and the big ol gamboling things the babies have become) as well as my pretty, pretty cakes.

Oh, and in school news, my graduation will officially be spring, rather than winter, so I'll have to pay an extra $120 to graduate as a non-registered student and to graduate in a different term than I said I would, and also have to turn in some paperwork since it's so late in the term--hopefully I'll be able to mail it in. Of course, all this is IF my prof passes me--I sent him an email asking him to please give me a grade soon so that I know whether I can just graduate late, or, if he fails me, if I need to re-apply. All for one damn credit. (His class was four units, but I took it anwyway because it was really cool. One is all I need to graduate, though.) I'm hoping he'll give me a grade soon and pass me, though, because it's a miracle I've managed to keep my massive failure from my parents this long. If I have to do another quarter, no way can I hide that. :/

Of course, right now I have a tiny orphan fuzzball curled up on my neck and purring, so it's hard to be too depressed at the moment.

Comments: Read 4 or Add Your Own.

Time:

12:47 am.

I just got home from a surprise concert! \o/

My friend Tyler decided to surprise me with tickets to see Ben Lee play at the Glass House--he actually didn't let me know who we were seeing until about ten minutes before the show started. Apparently it was the first show on his tour, and it was kind of a sad little turnout. I'm gonna say there were about fifteen people there for the first two openers, including me and Ty, and maybe about thirty, forty at the most, for the Ben Lee. I mean, the Glass House is small, but it's smallness only emphasized just how few people were there. That had to suck for everyone performing (especially the second performer, Annie Stele--not only did she have a cold, so she was reaching for notes she couldn't hit, but it was also just so obviously not her crowd) but it was such a nice little intimate gig for the audience--half the Ben Lee songs were audience sing-alongs, because hey, why not? Also it was Ben's first time performing with the band backing him, so it gave him a chance to try out some stuff, which was awesome. Ben Lee puts on a pretty awesome show, dudes. Also I've dug his songs for a few years now, but hearing his new stuff about undermining the patriarchal system and "boys with their barbies and girls with toy armies, we don't have to play by their rules" made me love him really a lot. I've heard the new album kind of sucks, but I might check it out.

I grabbed the ep of the first opener, Janu and the Watersharks, I think? And I would have liked to have heard more of Low vs. Diamond (they were an opening band and also backed Ben) because they had a good sound, but they had their shit turned up so fucking loud, and since there were no bodies to absorb the sound it was just bouncing off the walls and becoming totally distorted and hurting Ty's ears, so we sat outside for most of their set. I didn't grab their album because they already seemed to have a semi-decent fanbase built. I would have liked to have gotten Annie Stele's album, too, because she has a lovely voice but her songs were just deeply, deeply uninteresting--she seemed pretty young, though, so I'll probably keep an eye on how she develops.

Also since we showed up an hour early, and there was no point in hanging around the empty venue cause it definitely wasn't going to fill up, we wandered over to this awesome little used book store--I got a Henry James novel I've never read (The Other House), Pnin by Nabakov (1st edition paperback!), Ringworld by Larry Niven (Telis introduced me to him, and I've been wanting to read more) and a book for Tyler for twenty-five bucks. Also since a lot of the bands at the Glass House go over to the bookstore to trade signed cds for books, I heard a new band I'm digging a lot, Grand Ole Party.

And in other news, I finally managed to make a chewy, delicious chocolate chip cookie. All in all, an awesome fucking night.

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Subject:	Stuff I've been doing lately
Time:	3:27 am.

Baking!

I am really, really not a cook--I can make grilled cheese sandwiches, eggs, omelets, and pretty decent crepes, but I don't really try to make much of anything else because my teen years were full of burnt rice and failed cakes. Lately, though, I've been compelled to bake for some reason. I made two horribly failed attempts at chocolate chip cookies (the first time, I had no eggs, which resulted in tasteless dried out disks, and the second time I wrote down the recipe wrong and put in a cup of baking powder, which resulted in two cookie tins full of disgusting burnt slop) before making some very crispy, but actually cookie-tasting, double chocolate chip cookies. I also made a blackberry cobbler that turned out totally delicious, to my complete and utter surprise. Thank you, Betty Crocker!

I'm pretty sure my next attempt will be some better chocolate chip cookies, and a blueberry cobbler.

Making an effort to see friends

After a month of avoiding all humanity, I spent this weekend watching Battle Royale and playing Rock Band at my friend Shaunna's house.

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Time:

11:48 pm.

So, I've been kind of avoiding LJ and people in general because they sort of expect me to, like, talk about my life? And I haven't really wanted to because frankly, I'm kind of fucking up right now. During finals week I had three papers to turn in, didn't finish one of them, and basically freaked out and froze up and couldn't write it. I finally got it turned in and my prof has promised to give me a grade, but the fact that it's a month later and I don't have a grade yet means that when he submits it, I'll probably have to negotiate with my college to get them to give me a degree, since I already got a letter warning me that I might not be able to graduate. When I fuck up, I do it with style. /o\

So I spent a month trying and failing to do that and basically decompressing from the six or so years I spent in various colleges, and now I'm looking for jobs and trying to write a half-decent resume, which is fairly daunting considering how little work experience I have, especially in relevant fields. There are a few library jobs that I'm looking at, since I'm contemplating whether I want to do grad school for library science or english, or just enter the job market head-on, so I'm hoping my minimal customer service work will persuade them to give me a chance. If not, entry level clerical work it is.

In other news, I spent three hours at the emergency room with my sis last night because she had a high fever that wouldn't break, and she ached all over so much that she was crying, and all they did was take her temperature and give her tylenol. She went to the doctor today and apparently she has ear infections in both ears--pretty sure she's getting an antibiotic or something, but at the moment she still has a fever. Also my cat Baby has a big hole in his neck that we keep filling with ointment the vet gave us, and he keeps getting into fights and opening it back up. Stray cat Ugly got taken to the vet and had his teeth cleaned, so hopefully he won't be growling at his food from mouth pain and drooling brown crap anymore. Another of my cats, Brownie, has some sort of stomach problem--he flinches away when you pet his belly--but after taking the other two in we can't afford to get him to a vet for a little while. As for me, we switched dentists yet again because our new one was impossible to get ahold of, so now I get to wait until May to get the broken one yanked and just hope the rest don't fall out of my mouth before then.

And that's why I haven't been on much, because I would either be posting panicky entries about how I fail at life, or else telling you all about my exciting adventures cleaning my parents' house (I organized our linen closet! Good times, man) and cooking eggless chocolate chip cookies that predictably burned and tasted like ass, or talking about my ten thousand kitties and their various maladies. And I hate being all negative like that, and I don't really have a steady fandom right now so there's not much to post about there, so...yeah. I'm trying to get my shit together, though--writing my resume, contacting friends after my month-long hermit phase--so hopefully I'll be back to babbling at you soon. <3

And to make up for this post, here! ( Have a probably-never-to-be-finished Boy Meets World fic! )

ETA: Oh, I forgot to add that I got new bookshelves! I had three already, but they were really, seriously full and the books were infringing on the tops of the shelves, the tops of my dresser, etc., so my dad bought me two more to replace my crappy desk. All the shelves are now full (though four on one case are taken up by my lamp and various papers) and I spent two days rearranging them--now I have one full bookcase of non-fiction and graphic novels; one full bookcase of classic fiction, literary biographies, poetry, and lit analysis; one bookcase made up mostly of children's lit and YA with a shelf for horror; and one bookcase of contemporary lit and scifi/fantasy, including an entire shelf of Pratchett. It took forever, but I fucking love organizing my books and looking at the nicely defined categories afterward, dude. Such a nerd.

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Subject:	Hi, have a crazy student post!
Time:	9:54 pm.

Oh my god, guys.

So, I meant to sleep last night, and then I didn't. D: So I decided to stay up and try to write some of my paper that's due on Monday (which, btw, she said I could turn in through email \o/), and I did brainstorm a little about the quotes I want to use, but I didn't really end up doing that either because I don't really know how I want to address the topic question yet.

Instead, I inexplicably have a flood of ideas about my crazy complicated medieval lit paper that's due on Monday. I've written four pages about the interrelation of themes between The Book of the Duchess and Troilus and Criseyde, and I think it's actualfax quite brilliant.

However, there are problems:

A. This is not the paper I should be writing now. This paper is due on Thursday, and I have two papers which are due before this one.
B. I have already written four pages just about themes in BD and TC, and I'm not done yet. Except that the paper is supposed to be 10-12 pages long, and also cover the interrelation of themes between Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and also cover the relationships between structure and theme for all four of the works, and also somehow and for some reason relate them all to each other? IDK. (Side note: I suck at writing about structure so bad. So bad.) So basically I've already written like a third of this paper, and yet I still have a shitload more to cover and I have no idea how I'm going to fit it all into this paper. Or what the hell I'm going to write about the Pearl Poet works. DDD:
C. I am severely sleep-deprived, so it is quite likely that my brilliance will turn out to be blathering in the cold light of morning. /o\

I hate it when my brain turns against me and does shit like this, but otoh, I'm really really enjoying what I'm writing right now, and hopefully this will get my writing juices flowing for the essay I have to write tomorrow.

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Time:

7:44 pm.

Finals are next week! I'm really, really fucking glad that I only have two "real" finals, where I have to actually go in to class and write crap in a blue book and such.

Of course, I also have three essays to write and turn in, so I will probably be dead by Saturday. One of them will be fairly easy because our prof had us write abstracts/thesis paragraphs, so I already have a lot of my ideas for it outlined, and I also really enjoy the topics and the class which always makes writing easier; and one of them will be completely ridiculous and difficult because the topic is huge--it covers four seperate works, their interrelation, and theories on authorship--and also because the prof is difficult (he's the homophobic Medieval Lit prof who loves to blather on forever about the mathematical structure of medieval works and his own theories about meaning and doesn't really understand or respect other people's theories).

The first one I have to turn in, though, is kind of in the middle. It's a difficult topic, kind of broad and focused at the same time, but otoh, my professor trusts my writing enough that if she likes my paper, she wants to submit it to an essay-writing contest at my school! This is both totally awesome and flattering, and simultaneously anxiety-inducing because it puts more pressure on me to write an awesome paper. I'm really hoping she'll let me submit it through email so I can spend more time editing instead of traveling for five hours.

So basically I'm going to be spending the weekend writing the paper for Monday; spend Monday night and Tuesday writing the paper for Wednesday; spend Wednesday writing the paper for Thursday and studying for the final on Thursday; and spend Thursday studying and writing an outline for the essay portion of my final on Friday. /o\

And now I'm off to brainstorm essay ideas, answer comments on my last post, and read porn to distract myself from the fact that I'm not going to be able to do anything but study and write for the next week. (Okay, this is a lie--my essay-writing strategy tends to involve plenty of time spent reading my flist and following links in order to create that burst of creative panic that leads to writing frantically at the last minute, so I'll probably be online, but I'm going to try to limit my procrastination habits so as not to stress myself out too badly.) If I don't post an exuberant "yay, I survived finals!" post by Saturday, you'll know that I, you know, haven't. Or I've called up one of my friends to kidnap me away from my computer, since I'm sure my retinas will thank me for it by then.

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