Yvi

Tomorrow, I take my assessment for placement with this tutoring company I'm going to work with, then the next day I have two interviews and a university open house, and I'm going to spend the next couple weeks polishing grad school applications to a high shine. Maybe more fic, for when I get overwhelmed. Whew.

This past weekend was pretty rad. I got to hang out with hannahrorlove, deelaundry, and ayalesca, and narrowly missed bumping into bironic (and, by association, BILL NYE THE SCIENCE GUY). There was ice-cream eating and book-perusing and sculpture-garden wandering and, of course, we talked smack about every single one of you. &hearts

And now for something completely different, soda_and_capes has selected seven of my, admittedly rather vague, interests, which I will now elucidate. I use my interests field as more of a commonplace book for things that have stood out for me at some point in my life, so this is a nice trip down memory lane.

dreaming only geese
This is a reference to a book of Inuit folktales called The Girl Who Dreamed Only Geese, which I loved when I was younger. Also, the illustrations are by Leo and Diane Dillon, whose work will never not amaze me.

heautontimoroumenos
A poem by Charles Baudelaire, who was a BFF of mine during my emo phase and a harbinger of my obsession with French lit. It means "The Self-Tormentor" and, imho, Roy Campbell's translation is the best.

marrying tomorrow
This one can be taken two ways. One, I think of it as the act of flinging yourself forward and making the next day as awesome as you can, which is something I should try to do more often. And two, when the main character in Maurice (great book, great movie) admits to being "an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort," he undergoes a quick physical and is told he could "marry tomorrow" if he wanted to, BECAUSE THAT'S ALL THAT MATTERS AND NOT THE FACT THAT HE'S ACTUALLY GAYER THAN GAY.

uli saying thank you
Uli Herzner was a contestant on season three of Project Runway. She was so talented and sweet and had perfect manners and more people should be like that, myself included.

three chartreuse buzzards
A song I learned at Girl Scout camp that no one else has ever heard of. It kicks ass, I swear.

speaking seventeen languages badly
Representative of my own linguistic foibles and also a quote from The Last Unicorn, one of my favorite books and movies.

marinating in liminality
My default status! I love liminality (the process of transferring between two states without belonging to either) because it's the antithesis of pigeonholing. Victor Turner, another BFF from back when I was an anthropology major, sold me on it.

If you'd like me to pick seven of yours, just say the word.

Barn

She hit a boy
with a shovel
in a barn. She

saw nothing
but the math
of it. Ascent,
arc, intersect.

And the shapes:
triangle on oval
in a sun-drowned
pentagon.

A thing in motion
tends to stay. She
hit a boy. She
grew up to list

numbers in files
in pale rooms
full of dustless
air. She wears

nice clothes.
She wears
nice clothes.

-- Rachel Contreni Flynn

The other day, I had to look up "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" because I wanted to quote a bit of it in a fic and remembered this bit of fabulousness: The Love Song of J. Charlotte Proof-Reader.

Totes recommended if you're a litgeek and/or a T.S. Eliot fan.

We have lingered in the spaces of phallic signifiers,
By marginalised subjects wreathed with the tyranny of patriarchal representation

Gaaaah.

Am reading Twilight. Just to make sure it's really worth the wank.

Thing is, I was reading Lovecraft immediately beforehand, and the juxtaposition is like going from plasma-screen HDTV to a black-and-white affair with rabbit ears you have to spastically wave around in order to get anything resembling a satisfactory picture.

New!Teacher swore I would love it and send me the file earlier today. Eighty pages left and I am so thoroughly beyond unconvinced. She owes me an Atlas bar (which, bluerosefairy, are a highly recommended specimen of Korean junk food). This is seriously the least engaging thing I've read in a very long time. And that includes the photo essay on mangroves I just taught in fifth grade.

The "one big incestuous vampire family" thing could have been kind of cool, too. But I am Not Thinking About This because I have yet to start my Yuletide fic. Ahahaha, God help me.

I rediscovered a bunch of poetry books, which has proven to be pretty preoccupying. I was planning on being productive this weekend, since I was in NYC last week--saw Altar Boyz for a damn good price, went in the Church of Scientology, had some excellent Chinese food, among other things--but nostalgia is not to be underestimated. Reading "The Waste Land" is a worthy pursuit, right?

If you like pretty-but-mildly-creepy songs and/or Sylvia Plath, have a song.

Fisher: Mad Girl's Love Song

And the actual poem, which I knew backwards and forwards when I was fifteen or so.

Also, Licia drew Olivia Wilde for my fake birthday. Go forth and pay tribute!

I had a tutoring session yesterday that went really well--verbal SAT prep, and it turns out the kid is Korean-American, so we chatted a little about Korea--and today I got new shoes. Good times.

Tomorrow afternoon, I'll be hopping a bus to NYC in order to visit La Actriz, then coming back Sunday evening and crashing at Xanthe's since the metro's going to be closed by the time I get in. I think the plan is to take in a show while I'm up there, which would be cool.

This entry sucks, but I'm really bored right now. How are you?

ETA: There's a blog that does recaps of Christopher Pike books. The most recent entry is on Scavenger Hunt, the one with the incest and the dinosaurs and all these other heartrending plot points that Pike probably came up with during an LSD binge or something. Even in middle school, I was skeptical.

I am so there.

Visited the grandmother this weekend, managed to go the whole time without any major incidents with my mother. I finally read A Thousand Splendid fucking Suns to see what the hype was about and actually liked it more than I expected.

On a more frivolous note, I reread A Separate Peace on the drive back home and am jonesing for schoolboy slash. I should bug nakeno, when she's free, about working on jailbait!Wilson stuff. Or maybe try my hand at another Dead Poets Society fic. Way more interesting than cleaning my room.

I think some of the children's books I've read have the most gorgeous illustrations. As a wee bookworm, I was obsessed with fairy tales, then got into mythology when I was nine, and in addition to molding me into the anthro geek I became, some of the pictures completely blew me away.



If you're also a fairy-tale geek or just want to see some breathtaking illustrations, I highly recommend taking a look over here. My favorites are the ones for the Snow Queen.

And hey, since I'm working from home and there's snow on the ground and it's really kind of a cozy day...feel free to spill your own geekery in the comments. I love finding out what sort of stories have stuck with other people from their childhoods. =)

So, has anyone else read Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk and gotten phenomenally depressed?

Okay, it's satirical in nature and a percentage of the elements are just absurd and I was kind of hormonal at the time, but some of the stuff in there is just really sad.

It's just a bad sign when rereading Geek Love seems like a pick-me-up.

Behind on commenting, sorry; I'll get there!

Maybe I should start on Yuletide, too. Yes, I am made of 100% fail.

Drive-by awesomeness: Alan Rickman reads Shakespeare's Sonnet 130.