a week for the record books

I have been so busy this week I can barely wrap my mind around it myself, so I thought I'd blog about it so that in the future I can look back and say, "Wow. I was totally insane. What was I thinking? I'm glad my life isn't like that anymore." Except I won't be saying that a) because my life will always be like this and b) because I absolutely adore being busy. It's the only way I can ever get anything done. When I have a lot of time, I sit around and feel restless and bored and accomplish absolutely nothing. But this past week I went a bit overboard--an exercise in madness, I'd say.

Things start out fairly low-key on Monday and Tuesday but spiral out of control to near untenability by Saturday night:

Monday:

• spent morning working on grant applications
• 4:30-7pm: taught karate
• 7:15-9pm: attended screening of Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow, 1990) for the course I'm teaching

Tuesday:

• spent most of day working on grant applications and/or moping around
• went shopping for something for the girlfriend, also bought cute shirts from H&M
• 7:30-8:30pm: jiujitsu class

Wednesday:

• 12-3:30pm: attended two lectures and luncheon on campus
• 4:30-7pm: taught karate
• 7:30-9pm: horseback riding

Thursday:

• 9:30-11am: attended meeting about professional development with yesterday's lecturers
• 12-1pm: swam with my friend V. while wearing my new waterproof mp3 player, which I love
• 1-2pm: office hours
• 2-3:20pm: prepped for class
• 3:30-4:40: taught class. Most of my students hated Blue Steel, which I found a bit frustrating since I think there's so much more to the film than its rather implausible narrative. My students also turned in their midterm papers which I haven't had a chance to look at yet.
• 4:40-5:45: returned home to feed cats, dropped off backpack/laptop, switched wallet and cellphone from backpack to purse
• 6-7:30pm: cocktails and dinner with the Board of Trustees in my capacity as speaker for university graduate group here (they invited all the representatives of all the student groups on campus. There were probably ten of us total, undergrad and grad, from various groups, and forty or so Trustees.)
• 8-9:30pm: special performance of Garth Fagan Dance for the UR's Meliora Weekend (alumni and parents' weekend). Because I was part of the Trustees' "party" I had amazing seats in the fifth row. The performance was incredible, as always--I love modern dance.
• 9:30-10:45pm: returned home to change into my 80s outfit for an 80s dance party at a local bar in town: black short skirt, black tank, fuchsia tights, fuchsia nail polish, fuchsia felted wool hat (which my aunt made), hot pink satin tie, hot pink earrings, hot pink eyeshadow
• 10:45pm-1am: picked up my friend V. and then went to join a few of my other friends at the bar. The dancing itself was kind of lame because the DJ wasn't playing very danceable 80s music. But dressing up was fun.

Friday:

• 10:15-11:30am: attended the General Session of the Board of Trustees. Decided I either want to somehow become famous and very wealthy and become a Trustee or work my way up the academic ladder and become a Dean and/or Provost. What can I say? I like power.
• 12-1pm: Luncheon with Board of Trustees and other student reps.
• 1-2pm: Meeting with officers of the campus-wide graduate group. Brainstormed ideas about up-ing grad student involvement.
• spent the rest of the afternoon at home decompressing and shopping for groceries
• 7:30pm-12am: went over to my friend K.'s house, made her dinner (tacos carne asadas), watched Gia, which I had seen before but she hadn't (and I think she liked it but was utterly depressed afterward)

Saturday:

• 6am: got up (ugg!), showered, dressed, picked up three other students to drive Cornell (approximately two hours away) for a video art conference
• 7-9:30am: drove to Ithaca/Cornell U.
  
• 9:30am-12:50pm: first session of the conference
• 1-2pm: lunch
• 2-4pm: second session of the conference and the hideously long Q&A in which the moderator didn't seem to understand ending things on time (they went half an hour over). The conference affirmed my suspicions about why video art is not useful for my work and how it doesn't fit with my project. This may sound like a negative, but I actually appreciated the reassurance of what I already suspected.
• 4:30-7pm: picked up coffee at Dunkin Donuts and headed back home
• 7pm: talked to four different friends on the phone to solidify evening plans despite the fact that I was exhausted (there had been a plan to go dancing, but I was getting the distinct impression this was going to fall through)
• 7:30-8:30pm: got a second wind, showered away the day's grim and redressed in less formal clothing
• 8:30-9:45pm: dinner with friends V., N., B. and A. at an excellent Italian restaurant managed by a friend of mine (he always gives me free food even though he doesn't have to--I love the food there and would go back again and again anyway)
• 9:45-10:00pm: dropped off V. and N. at home, picked up flowers for my friend K. at the grocery store (she was having a bad day)
• 10:00-10:15pm: talked briefly to April on my cell
• 10:15pm: re-joined A. (who had dropped off B. at home) in front of some guy's house who was supposedly having a party. I told A. I'd go with her for a little while since clubbing plans had fallen through but when we arrived there seemed to be no party happening. We decided to go have a drink and come back in case people were just late in arriving.
• 10:15-11pm (ish): drank margaritas with A. and chatted
• 11pm-1am: returned to guy's house but it still didn't look like anyone was there. A. didn't really know him very well so we decided it would be awkward to knock in case the party is actually next week. And then we decided to go out dancing anyway even though everyone else flaked out. Very fun and cathartic and lovely to hang out with A. even though it would have been great if others had wanted to join us.
• 1am: dropped by K.'s apartment on my way home from dancing to give her the flowers (she's a night owl, I knew she'd still be up)
• drove home and talked to April on the cell for about 30 minutes (she's in a different timezone so it wasn't even midnight yet for her) until I had to go to bed or risk falling over from exhaustion.

Whew!

And then today, I've spent most of the day working on the aforementioned grant applications, catching up on email and reading the proofs of a forthcoming article. It feels nice to have a day off, so to speak (although all I've done is work all day), but somehow I feel oddly restless again. Ah, well, another week is ahead of me.

the sarah connor chronicles

Dear Fox Networks,
If you actually air this pilot and the show turns out to be any good at all, perhaps I will reconsider my general disdain towards your network and its right-wing conservatude. Right now you really only have The Simpsons and Family Guy going for you (and I suppose House), but those are all old news. Don't you want to take that step towards good drama programming? Don't you?

And, seriously, Summer Glau? Then it has to be good.



Or, it could be really bad. But at least air the pilot, yo. Okay?

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz....

I. Am. Exhausted.

In case my subject heading for this entry didn't give that away.

Actually this post is kind of a placeholder for a couple things. One, it marks me exceeding the 100th post on my Blog. Yay! Two, it's an apology for the 3 people who read this journal (anyone, anyone, Bueller?) in regards to my general lack of posting the past few weeks. I was getting really good at staying on top of the blogging, but then life intervened. I got back from Colorado on Wednesday night after visiting April over the weekend, which was lovely but sad (because I had to leave again), and I've been so ridiculously busy the past few weeks I can't even think straight (no pun intended). What with teaching karate and weekly horseback riding and trying to write dissertation fellowship applications and writing a call for papers for a journal issue I'm co-editing and somehow becoming the Speaker for the graduate group at UR and teaching my women's studies class...I don't really have much time to breathe, let along post LJ entries. Blah. And now ImageOut (Roc's LGBTQ film festival) has started (I was on the programming committee) and I'm running around like a chicken with my head cut off introducing movies and entertaining guests (actually just one guest, but still).

I did, however, read a good book recently (on the plane to CO): A Spot of Bother, by Mark Haddon (he also wrote The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, which is told from the point of view of a boy with Asperger's Sydrome). His newest novel is quite good with fascinatingly-flawed ensemble cast of characters. Charming, witty and a bit sad all at the same time.

eastern promises

Friday night, I was all ready to settle down for an evening of rampant Netflix-enabled television-on-DVD viewing, when a friend called and asked if I wanted to see the new David Crohenberg thriller, Eastern Promises (starring Viggo Mortensen and Naomi Watts) with her and a few others. Part of my brain, suffering from inertia, wanted to just stay home, but the wiser part of my brain told me that I should go and be a social butterfly or I might regret it and not actually ever get it together to watch the film. I had heard good things, but didn't actually think Eastern Promises was my kind of movie (whatever that means). In any case, I wasn't really in the mood to watch a narrative about the Russian mob and white slavery--especially considering how violent the movie was said to be.

Ultimately, I was exceptionally glad my friend called me. Eastern Promises is an incredible film, one I enjoyed far more than I expected. The violence is intense, but isolated, and the rest of the film has a haunting stillness to it that seems to be the new modus operandi for the contemporary thriller (e.g. The Brave One). While my friend was able to provide an instantaneous, intellectual and eloquent post-film analysis, I'm not feeling particularly smart this weekend, so I'll settle for pointing you in the direction of A.O. Scott's NY Times Review.

does mama have to do everything around here?

In honor of 30 Rock's Emmy win and Tina Fey's general brilliance, I bring you three YouTube videos. The first two are NBC promotional videos for the show--one about Alec Baldwin's comedic excellence, the second about Liz Lemon's (Tina's character) poor dating track record. Both include some of my favorite clips from the show. The third clip is Tina Fey's new American Express ad, which basically wraps up everything I love about Tina Fey in a big bright package with a bow on top.

Oh, and watch 30 Rock -- season 2 begins October 4 at 8:30pm and the entire first season is available legally and for free on NBC.com! It is truly my favorite sitcom of all time.

i want my dog back!

On the surface, the plot of The Brave One is somewhat simplistic, a standard revenge/vigilante thriller with a satisfying, if implausible, ending. But, deep down, it's something more: a brutal love song to the city of New York, a narrative about reclamation and identity and overcoming traumas that are impossible to overcome. It's not a perfect film by any means, but the underlying psychology of the film and Jodie Foster and Terrence Howard's subtle, precise performances lend The Brave One a quiet brilliance that, for me, makes up for its occasional stumbles. Besides, who can resist Jodie Foster kicking ass, enacting a fantasy of vigilantism that everyone can relate to even if only in our darkest dreams.

A radio journalist with an NPR-esque program called "Street Walk," Erica Bains (Jodie Foster) is almost impossibly happy with her life and her fiance, David, a doctor played by Naveen Andrews (from the hit TV show Lost). Knowing what's about to happen in the film, their happiness together is especially heartbreaking and, I agree with A.O. Scott's NY Times review in this, "remind[s] you just how little the portrayal of happiness has figured in Ms. Foster’s recent performances" (for another compelling NY Times article that's more about Foster than the film, read "Forever Jodie, Forever a Pro"). Walking through Central Park with their dog at dusk, Erica and David are savagely attacked by three hoodlums with a pipe. When Erica awakens three weeks later in the hospital, she's told that David is dead and finds her world crumbling around her.

Barely able to leave her apartment for fear of the streets she used to love, Erica buys a gun illegally (worried she won't make it through the mandatory 30 day wait for a license) for protection. Trouble seems to find Erica, and when she witnesses a murder at a convenience store, she's forced to take the law into her own hands. Afterwards, Erica finds herself becoming a different person, and while the first time she fires her gun she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, each episode of her vigilantism escalates compellingly, from justifiable self-defense to questionable entrapment to outright predation. Meanwhile, she befriends Terrence Howard's character Detective Mercer, who's been assigned to the case of the unknown vigilante killer, even interviewing him for her radio show. Foster and Howard have a tenuous sort of chemistry that's perfect for their relationship on screen.

The most fascinating aspect of The Brave One for me is how deeply it tries to entrench us in Erica's mind, to make us experience what she's going through and to let us see how even she doesn't truly understand what she's going through. For an action film, The Brave One is remarkably restrained, relying more on psychological tension than gratuitous violence. Moreover, the cinematography--New York all sharply-focused edges and oversaturated grey-tones--and largely ambient soundtrack really add to the vicious, deeply disturbing calmness of the film.

ocd mtwtfss

While I was in Germany in May, I brought a set of days-of-the-week socks. Only I didn't realize at the time that they were days-of-the-week socks; I just thought, "Oh! Look at the pretty multicolored seven-pack of ankle socks. How exciting!" Now, as much as I love my pretty multicolored days-of-the-week socks, they are causing a bit of a problem for me because every time I go to get a pair of socks from that particular batch (I do have other, non-labeled, socks as well) I feel obnoxiously compelled to find the proper day. It doesn't matter if I'm wearing green and the correct day's socks are purple. And no matter how I try to overcome this compulsion, I can't. The idea of wearing the wrong day's socks drives me crazy. And the search for the correct pair of socks drives me crazy. It's almost enough to make me want to not ever wear any of the days-of-the-weeks socks ever again. And that's just so sad. Sad, as in pathetic. And a little bit sad-sad, too.

ash and scribbs

I've recently discovered a new television show over which to obsess--to the point that I watched the first three episodes back-to-back the moment they were delivered to me via Netflix. Murder in Suburbia is an hour-long British police show starring two female detectives who, you guessed it, investigate murders in suburban England. Its like Cagney and Lacey meets Monk meets Sex and the City meets Law and Order. Kate Ashurst and Emma Scribbins (affectionately nicknamed Ash and Scribbs) are clever and gutsy and quite amusing (their banter and Ash's "rules" pretty much make the show), with Ash playing posh to Scribbs's down-to-earth party-girl charm. It's a fluffy show, no deep hidden morals or inner truths, but it's well-made and highly entertaining--and not just because of all the British accents.

it wasn't easy to do what he had to do

Last night I watched Making Love, a 1982 film directed by Arthur Hiller and starring Michael Ontkean (as Zach), Kate Jackson (as Zach's wife, Claire) and Harry Hamlin (as Zach's lover, Bart). It's a film that's practically canon in gay film history because of its sensitive and thoughtful portrayal of a married man coming out and accepting his homosexuality. I was more impressed and moved by this film than I expected to be (especially since I intended to watch it only to fuel my love affair with Kate Jackson). Making Love is well-done and compelling, but its stakes are also crystal clear: the film wants to dissuade its audience from the notion of homosexuality as a perversion and so a few moments that would have made the film more 'real' got left by the wayside. While we all may dream of having as understanding a wife (or husband) as Jackson's character--who, after only a minor breakdown (well-acted, I might add), decides she really just wants her husband to find happiness, even if its not with her--her relative compassion for the situation does seem a bit out of place. And even though I prefer a little more veracity in my social consciousness-raising films, I can respect a film that wants to secure sympathy for all its characters and not allow either the gay husband, his loner lover or the jilted wife to seem villains. Overall, completely worth-seeing, and not just because of Jackson’s appeal.

PoP goes my heart!

I watched Music and Lyrics last night, the Drew Barrymore/Hugh Grant vehicle in which he plays an aging pop star and she plays the aspiring writer who happens to have a knack for lyrics and helps him write a new comeback song. Typical romantic comedy fodder: boy meets girl, boy needs girls help, boy and girl fall and love, boy does something stupid, girl is sad, boy repents and makes it up to her...happily ever after. Needless to say--because I love Barrymore and Grant--it was an adorable movie and totally made my night. It's not the most brilliant rom-com in the world (it's not on its way to becoming a classic like When Harry Met Sally or anything), but was still very well-done and clever. I especially enjoyed getting to sing along to the incredibly cheesy-oh-so-wonderful pop songs that peppered this film.

inhale exhale inhale exhale inhale...

So, quick update in bullet points because I'm feeling a bit lazy tonight:

• April's been in Colorado now for almost a month (she's an assistant professor, tenure-track even--which means I'm dating a professor, how strange!), and it's both better and worse that I expected. I miss her terribly and the house is incredibly empty, but I'm coping all right and we talk every night. While I'm lonely, I don't feel that awkwardness that sometimes comes with the long-distance relationship territory, so that's heartening.
  
  
• Meanwhile, the cats are keeping me company. Reggie (April's cat--who's with me until she can fly him back to CO with her) is especially clingy. Velcro-cat. So lovable.
  
  
• Speaking of cats, I had a hysterical, adrenaline packed half hour last night when my cat, Olive, caught a mouse and then proceeded to torture it. I tried to get it away from her--I couldn't stand to see the poor, terrified thing try to run away and get toyed with. It escaped into the fireplace and I haven't seen it since. Either it was relatively uninjured and managed to sneak away later in the evening (highly doubtful) or it died a lonely, scared death in the ashes from internal bleeding. I know it's silly, but I'm still a bit torn up about it. I couldn't let Olive near me the rest of the night. Especially since she's in the habit of licking me. Eww. Icky, mangy mouse breath!
  
  
• I started teaching my Action Heroine class (noted in an earlier post) on Thursday and the first day seemed to go well. I like my students and I hope we all have a fun semester together. You can find the syllabus here, if you're interested.
  
  
• I'm also teaching karate at my dojo. The little kids (4-7 year-old white belts!) are both the cutest and by far the hardest to teach. They have the attention span of gnats and can't stand still to save their lives. It's a good thing their so cute. Survival of the species--mammals are the cutest at the age when they're the most annoying.
  
  
• Because of the lonely-house malaise I've been relying heavily on my Netflix account to supply me with movies and television shows to while away the empty hours. Expect to see more film reviews in this space in the near future.
  

making the sky rain coconuts with pinpoint accuracy

So I watched Supergirl (from 1984) last night. That's two hours of my life I'll never get back. The only redeeming factor was that it was so inane and ludicrous, that I laughed through most of the movie. Laughing at the movie, not with the movie. Of course they were basing it to some extent on the comic books, but that's no excuse for gigantic plot holes and general stupidity. And I think the cinematographer had watched Barbarella (the crazy-campy-wonderful 1968 Jane Fonda sci-fi/fantasy sexploitation film) one too many times but didn't channel it particularly well. And that was the least of the film's problems.

I've been watching a lot of old (and not so old) action heroine films in the past few months because I'm teaching an Introduction to Women's Studies class on Action Heroines in American Culture in the fall, and though I already have a syllabus together, I want to have a general sense of what else is out there. I'm having trouble with the 80s; there really isn't much. My filmography (so far) is below. If you see anything that I'm missing (American films or television shows or foreign films/shows with a widespread US release -- action films with a female protagonist), leave me a comment and let me know!

The Avengers (TV: 1961-1969)
Honey West (TV: 1965-1966)
Get Smart (TV: 1965-1970)
Faster Pussycat, Kill Kill (1965)
Barbarella (1968)
Coffy (1973)
Cleopatra Jones (1973)
Foxy Brown (1974)
The Bionic Woman (TV: 1976-78)
Wonder Woman (TV: 1976-79)
Charlie's Angels (TV: 1976-81)
Alien (1979)
Remington Steel (TV: 1982-87)
Cagney and Lacey (TV: 1982-88)
Sheena (1984)
Supergirl (1984)
The Terminator (1984)
She-ra: Princess of Power (TV: 1985)
Aliens (1986)
Blue Steel (1990)
La Femme Nikita (1990)
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
Thelma and Louise (1991)
Buffy: The Vampire Slayer (1992)
Bad Girls (1994)
The Next Karate Kid (1994)
Tank Girl (1995)
Xena: The Warrior Princess (TV: 1995-2001)
The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)
G.I. Jane (1997)
La Femme Nikita (TV: 1997-2001)
Buffy: The Vampire Slayer (TV: 1997-2001)
The Avengers (1998)
The Matrix (1999)
Charlie’s Angels (2000)
Miss Congeniality (2000)
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
Ginger Snaps (2000)
Cleopatra 2525 (TV: 2000-2001)
Kill Bill, Vol. 1 (2001)
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001)
Alias (TV: 2001-2006)
Birds of Prey (TV: 2002-2003)
Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (2003)
Lara Croft, Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003)
Underworld (2003)
Kill Bill, Vol. 2 (2004)
Catwoman (2004)
Ginger Snaps: Unleashed (2004)
Aeon Flux (2005)
Domino (2005)
Elektra (2005)
Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous (2005)
Serenity (2005)
V for Vendetta (2005)
Underworld: Evolution (2006)
Heroes (TV: 2006- )
Bionic Woman (TV: 2007- )

my new food network girlfriend

YAAAAAAAAAAY!

Amy Finley won The Next Food Network Star. And, yes, I'm insanely excited because I love her (and really didn't like Rory, the other possible, at all). I adored Paul, but he got eliminated before the final round. Besides, she's cute.

(I know, I'm crazy, but it's the only reality show I watch, folks. Let a girl have her moment.)

bugsy malone

April and I went to the Dryden Theatre tonight to see Bugsy Malone, a 1976 cult classic that I'd never heard of before. Totally brilliant. Set in prohibition-era New York City, it's a pseudo-noir gangster film musical romantic comedy, and the entire cast is made up of children between the ages of 6 and 14. All the kids were amazing, especially Jodie Foster and Scott Baio who star in the film as the worldly nightclub singer Tallulah and the good-natured hero Bugsy, respectively. Foster's so good, it's a little uncanny, actually. You know she's only 14 at the time of this film and yet she acts like she's 20--a very earnest, very mature 20. Amazing, but freaky.

Here's the original trailer of the film. If you haven't seen it, I'd order it on Netflix. There's really nothing like it.

nikki and nora

Through my vast and nefarious internet connections, I just discovered that in 2004 UPN optioned a drama pilot about, of all things, two lesbian detectives (partners in both senses of the word) in New Orleans. It was called Nikki and Nora and was supposed to be a CSI/Law and Order sort of show. Obviously, the show didn't make it off the ground and the pilot is all that was ever filmed, but I'm amazed and impressed that UPN even optioned it in the first place. In any case, maybe I'm the last to know, but I've heard nary a peep about this until recently so I doubt it. There was brief article about the show on AfterEllen.com, but besides that there's not much out there. However, a few weeks ago someone I sort of know (in that aforementioned nefarious internet sort of way) posted the entire pilot on YouTube in pretty decent quality so I thought I should share.

The pilot's really not bad--such a crying shame it never aired.

a mighty heart

Knowing well that I was risking a night of almost certain depression, last night April and I went to see a preview screening of A Mighty Heart (Dir. Michael Winterbottom), the drama based on the search for and murder of kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and featuring Angelina Jolie as his wife Mariane. I'd heard a bit about the film beforehand, mostly comments about Jolie--e.g. some questioning of her suitability for the role and suggestions that she was too big a star for the film, that her celebrity might taint the integrity of the story, plus some rumors that Jolie used artificial bronzer so her skin tone would closer approximate that of the Cuban-French Mariane. And, of course, I also knew the story of Daniel Pearl in that oblique way I know about most headline news.

We all know how the story ends, we can imagine how the story begins, but, as the tagline of the film tells us, "this is the story you haven't heard." And, surprisingly, it's true. I think, if nothing else, the film embodies the harrowing uncertainty and claustrophobia (as one of my friends described it) of military and police investigations. As Mariane's house becomes the center of operations in the search for her husband, the growing number of computers and printers and ringing cell phones serve well to signify the intricate, violent, convoluted turmoil of war and terrorism.

While we may know the ending, it is very clear from her steadfast optimism and her cautious hope that Mariane does not, and I think this is something that Jolie conveys extremely well. (By the way, I quickly got over "Angelina" and came to focus on her as "Mariane," and I don't agree at all that she's too big for the picture. This could be a potential problem with almost any big-name actor, and it's up to the actor to embody their role so fully that you believe. And Jolie does this.) In fact, all the actors were excellent--from the Police Captain played by Irfan Khan (also in The Namesake) and Archie Panjabi as fellow reporter and friend Asra Q. Nomani to an ensemble of recognizable and not-so-recognizable others whose acting, overall, was understated, dramatic and heartfelt in all the right ways.

On the whole, I think the film does what it sets out to do--tell an untold story--and somehow manages to do this without being totally over the top. Discomfiting camera angles, slightly grainy film stock (unless that was just my imagination), and crowded, tightly-framed scenes imbue the film with a continual aura of anxiety. While it, fortunately, doesn't strive for the over-dramatic or the graphically-traumatic, the film also doesn't shy away from despair when the time comes. Most of the film is just quietly heartwrenching, but Mariane's eventual breakdown is so visceral it made me want to look away from the screen, and yet it felt completely appropriate, even necessary, and such a hauntingly-stark contrast to her previous hopeful vitality that this scene all but made the film for me.

row, row, row your boat

I'm sitting in a ferry backing out of a French port on our way across the Channel to Dover and have a fairly strong wireless connection. That alone seemed to be reason enough to post.

The trip has been great so far; my Oma's (grandma's) 80th birthday went well (even though a server at the restaurant where the party was being held dropped one of the five home-baked cakes on the asphalt while transporting it from car to kitchen). Otherwise, it's been relaxing, and I've accomplished nothing besides vast amounts of shopping--typical--and a trip via the pleasingly-punctual regional train to Cologne to visit my good friend N. and her boyfriend, both of whom I got to know at UR my first year in VCS (she came as part of the German exchange program, to get an MA in Comp. Lit.).

More later when we reach London. I'm going to let April check her email, too, as long as this connection holds out!

i heart patricia arquette

"You see messages from dead people?"
(You really need to hear Neve Campbell's delivery of this line to love it as much as I do.)

God, I love Medium.

And I am deeply, deeply upset that I will be in Germany during the season finale. I started screaming at the screen when I realized that this episode was going to be another "to be continued..." Waaahh.

the young and the restless

I was at the gym today, trying to make up for the fact that when I leave for Germany on Monday I won't be able to exercise at all (except sporadic attempts of the "8 minutes abs" video with my mother), and I was listening to various weird disco tracks that I downloaded onto my iPod god-knows-when and watching, of all things, The Young and the Restless. Okay, so "watching" is probably an overstatment, as it was more of a distraction, an inability I have to work out in front of a big flat-screen tv without being drawn into whatever's on. Even if it's The Young and the Restless. Sometimes, if I'm in the right mood, I'll watch even if it's Nascar or NFL or some other ESPN nonsense (I draw the line at golf, though). Anyway, my post's not really supposed to be about that. I don't care about The Young and the Restless, except that the title seemed apt. Onwards.

That said, I took my qualifying exams a little over a week ago, and while it was tremendously exciting to jump through that one huge, firey hoop, I now find myself in a sort of general malaise, a restless stupor, if you will. The fact that I proctored a 3-hour calculus exam today for a little bit of extra money isn't helping matters. Proctoring is probably one of the most mind-numbing things you can do yourself--staring at 220 students as they sweat over their answer sheets, constantly moving about and scanning the rows and rows of seats to make sure no one's cheating. I'd honestly rather watch grass grow because at least then I could take a nap or read a book and not have to worry that the grass would sneak off to the bathroom and read a cheat sheet off of its cell phone. And I have to do two more of these this week!

Oh well, I really shouldn't complain. I am getting paid for my misery, and I did willingly sign up for the hours. I thought that sitting and doing nothing for 3 hours would feed and placate my post-exam inertia, but apparently all it did was make me even more restless and useless. I'm supposed to be writing an abstract to submit to a call for papers, but instead I'm doing everything but: fiddling with my MySpace and Friendster profiles and photos (neither of which anyone but me reads, I think), posting to my blog (ditto the last parenthetical), checking my email literally every 10 minutes (why are there no emails? why???), and a whole host of other things which I refuse to own up to.

Pre-exam, I felt very strongly that I should have a post-exam break to enjoy some relative freedom from writing before what I hope will be a productive summer. Funny that now I don't really want that freedom as much as I thought. My attempts at relaxation have made me restless, sullen and emotionally needy. How tragic. Almost melodramatic. Soap-operatic?

Okay. Clearly I'm losing my mind. Perfect mindset to write an abstract.

poetry with an edge

Something my mother sent me this afternoon that gave me much pleasure:

Wordsworth...for the YouTube generation