written in wind and running water

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 06:18:11 GMT

dude. i did not kill anyone in my psych of gender and race class tonight, even if they deserved it. on the other hand, we were running behind, so there was only a half hour of the supposed topic. i don't know what the official name of the topic is, but given that the assigned reading is Real Boys and Guyland, it's basically the psych version of BUT WHAT ABOUT THE MENZ? my copies of the readings are full of angry margin notes, and I was lucky the professor didn't randomly call on me to get my opinion, because the only answer I have to "what did you think about the reading?" is pretty much "i wanted to throw it against the wall." pray for me, flist - next week we're going to spend all class on this, and I think I might have a rage blackout if I have to talk about why making sure teachers don't ignore girls in the classroom prevents boys from taking on their god-given position at the top of the pyramid. (plus, so much of the data is bad: all those studies that fearmonger to the white UMC parents about how girls go to college at higher rates than boys fail to mention that in that demographic, it's the same, and it's only once you break down the stats by race and class that you can see where the disparity really lies.)

so then i came home and watched grey's anatomy, which, for all its melodrama, does not suffer from the 'what about the menz' problem

i was all ready to call this episode adorable. hunt got christina a cardio god and she eventually decided that it was a good present! cardio god and hunt talked about their feelings in an almost-adult sort of way! the dementia-stricken patient got cured! every moment with sloan and callie onscreen together was adorable and I love them! bailey was super competent and definitely not flirting with the chief!

and then it ended with that punch in the gut. granted, i think it would have been much stronger without that montage - to just have the shot of Joe pouring and then end - but still. oh, chief. :( oh, chief, :( :( :(

and now I am going to go to bed and sleep for like 10 hours. i was going to get up early and go sort of crash a linguistics conference, but the paper I really want to hear presented (as opposed to just 'ooh, syntax') isn't until saturday morning and I need the sleep more than I need to hear about obscure details of wh-movement. the conference is here on campus, which is nice because it's a five minute walk to get there, but on the other hand, it's sort of being run by our grad students, a lot of whom know me, which makes the crashing the conference plan a little more fraught.

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 05:05:16 GMT

and i thought the worst part of the episode was going to be when Reid announced all matter of factly, "there have been cases where after ennucleation the mental patient consumed the eyeballs" (although how funny was the cop's "...are you serious?" and Reid's :[ nod? followed by the cut to the egg getting mashed up with the fork (although i could tell that was a red herring, because eyeballs are not that squishy - inside, yes, but the outside is much tougher*)).

but no, i think i'm going to give that award to THE HUMAN EYEBALLS IN THE DEAD ANIMAL. jfc, and i don't even have an eye squick. at least, i didn't used to.

also, how adorable were morgan and garcia? so much love for them!

*7th grade science. cow eye. i swear i'm not a serial killer chopping up people's eyeballs.

ETA: unrelatedly: ...and there go the Houses of Parliament, to the sound of 1812. Oh, school. Oh, school.

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:05:15 GMT

My history professor (the cool one, not the one that makes me crazy with rage) just announced that the idea of incest was much more 'in the air' in the Middle Ages than it is now.

...

yeah, speak for yourself, buddy. maybe in the circles you hang out with.

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 01:53:02 GMT

Do you ever wake up and say, man, today I really want to talk about gender in pop culture? No? Just me? Well, okay, here I go.

Merlin

I actually don't have anything really concrete to say about this one. I know that Merlin is sort of terminally sketchy on issues of gender (and race), but something about these episodes just rubbed me wrong. The woman who Uther is attracted to is secretly a scheming monster, but he doesn't know it! Hilarity ensues! I think it's too easy to read as a metaphor, and it's a really ugly metaphor.

Also, all the scenes where he's pressing her to consummate the relationship made me really uncomfortable.

Rampant, by Diana Peterfreund

Okay, so this is nominally a book about killer unicorns and the women who hunt them. But it's really a book about teenage girls and sex and virginity. Because women who are descended from certain families have the power to be unicorn hunters - as long as they are virgins. So, yes, it's about girls who have magical powers only as long as they are virgins. AND YET! it did not make me want to throw it across the room, which I thought was an fairly impressive accomplishment on Peterfreund's part. (it did make me roll my eyes a couple of times, though.)

There's a couple of reasons that i think this works for me. First, the narrator (and the other girls) have desire and want to go out and meet boys (or girls) and there's conflict there - they don't meekly accept their prescribed virginity. (In addition, the administrators who want them to stay in the convent all the time and never meet boys are the same as the ones who are portrayed as overbearing and controlling, and the ones whom the text labels as reasonable are the ones that say, sure, go have fun!) I would have liked, though, to see at least one of the girls say "you know, maybe I'd rather have sex than spend the rest of my life hunting killer unicorns that hunt you too!" - I think the text would not have condemned that choice but it would have been nice to see. (One of the girls does get raped - more on that later - and I was reasonably pleased with how it was dealt with by the unicorn hunters. Even though she could no longer hunt, she didn't get thrown out, just asked if she'd be willing to move over to the admin/research/management side of things instead.)

The other thing that I appreciated were the PSAs about what makes a good boyfriend vs a bad boyfriend. (Keep in mind, this is YA lit.) Initially, the narrator has a 'good' boyfriend - he pushes her for more, but always stops when she says no. (The narrator later changes her mind about whether this made him a good boyfriend.) The girl who gets raped isn't dragged into a dark alley by a man with a knife - it's her boyfriend, with whom she had talked about and agreed on her limits, and who breaks those limits. When the girl talks about it with the narrator later, it fits with other descriptions of daterape that I've read, and the text never suggests that it wasn't really rape, or that she shouldn't have gone back to his room with him. This was delightfully refreshing. At the end, the narrator finally gets a good boyfriend, whose response to hearing that the narrator wants to keep being a unicorn hunter and thus a virgin is basically, "sweet. we'll just make out a lot."

(Although, okay, and here I'm going to demonstrate why I have a reputation as a rules-lawyer among many of my friends. If they can make out, it's not that they can't have any sexual interaction with boys ever. Presumably, PIV sex is right out (even when it's rape - sigh). But the text is explicit about establishing that virginity is not tied to the presence of the hymen, so it's not that PIV causes the lack of the hymen and hence the lack of magical unicorn hunting powers. So where do we draw the line? Handjobs? Could she peg him? and what about sex with other girls?)

Anyways, it's not a great book, but it's light and fun and easy to blow through, if you're into the killer unicorn kind of thing.

White Collar

I cannot lie: White Collar is pretty much my happy place. It took about 30 seconds into the most recent episode before I totally had a goofy :DDDDDD face at Peter trying to catch a cab and Neal thwarting him. That does not mean that I don't have thoughts about it, though!

1. I think I will like the Kate storyline much better now that it looks like she's under some external pressure and is sending Neal clues. Neither 'Neal needs to win back the woman who dumped him' or 'Kate is a damsel in distress and needs to be saved' was really working for me. (Cmon. You know Neal's wife is going to be just as badass as he is.)

2. What on Earth does this show think 'white collar' means? I hear white collar, and I think identity theft, crooked accountants, insider trading, and that sort of thing. So far, we've seen counterfeiting, forgery, safecracking, smuggling, and murder. were I more cynical, I would suspect that they are using a definition that roughly means 'crimes that affect rich people' - after all, those are the crimes worth talking about, right?

3. At least twice in the pilot, Peter goes on about 'the way things work' and how people get what they've earned. (Neal, of course, gets lots of things that he hasn't earned, and this pisses Peter off.) I find this a really interesting character note. It's like one part belief in American individualism and bootstraps and all that crap, and one part resentment towards the criminals he catches, who are getting what they don't deserve. It might make more sense to me if I read Peter as having a working-class background. (even if FBI agents in charge of things aren't really working class anymore.)

4. I miss Diana! I don't know if she just wasn't in this episode, or it's one of those things where the cast of the pilot doesn't get totally carried over when the series gets picked up. If it is the second, I will be sad, because she was awesome. Also, she had no interest in dancing with Neal! (I mean, dude's hot - I'd dance with him - but it was nice to see someone who saw right through him.) (Also, she provided an interesting example of Peter's class issues - she was contrasted at least twice with his Harvard team, with the implication that she was super competent and capable, and they were ....not. It was my impression, based on the character's accent, that she was also intended to be from a working class background.)

5. We had better be getting more about June and Byron, or I will be very sad.

6. And finally, to end with a little bit of sexy: okay, clearly Neal is very hot, yes? and he and Peter have a little bit of a thing going on. But I cannot in good faith ship Peter/Neal, because of Elizabeth and how awesome she is. (And I also can't get behind fic where the woman tells her guy "go on, have your cake and eat it too!" and sends him off to have sex with another dude because, no. Even threesomes where the guy convinces the gal to try it sort of weird me out.) So, some scenarios that I have been thinking about:
-Elizabeth decides she really wants to see Neal and Peter get it on!
-Elizabeth decides that she wants to sleep with Neal, and Peter can come along!
-Neal and Elizabeth scheme! (actually, I think I would read a million words of Neal and Elizabeth gen, especially if Peter is befuddled.)

Of course, all of these require centering women and women's desires when there are men that could be written about, so I'm not going to hold my breath waiting or anything.

in which i am the least suave person ever

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 03:46:03 GMT

1. On Thursday at practice, I did something sort of unthinkably stupid and got hit in the face. I was fine through practice, then I had a bit of a freakout later about just how fucking stupid that was and how badly it could have gone, then, after that, I spent some time worrying that I was going to end up with bruises on my face, which would have been a problem because of reasons (2) and (3)

2. On Friday, I had therapy in the morning (which was mostly kind of blah, but near the end I had one of those moments where you're just talking, you know, and you say something and you're like "holy shit, is that what I actually think?" to which the answer is "yes" and "but now that I know it I can root it out, because I deserve to get the things that I want, dammit") and on my way out I walked basically straight into the corner of one of the low dividing walls (leaving me with a bruise 2x10cm on my thigh that has gone through a whole range of colors: red, purple, green, yellow (and not euphemistic purple, either: i'm talking the colors of red and purple grapes))

3. On Saturday, I spent all day in the company of practicing psychologists talking about race. Much of it was neither thrilling nor boring, but one of the keynotes put me to sleep (there were a lot of statistics, okay?) and one of the sessions ended up as a truly fascinating discussion about biracial identity (someone brought up how the US Census defines Hispanic, or how it deals with biracial/multiracial people, and a dude in the audience stood up and said basically, "yeah, i work for the census, and we know how we define things now doesn't work, and we're trying to fix it). also, i overslept my alarm by like an hour and was only saved by being an hour late by a lucky run-in with a be-car'd classmate going to the same conference.

4. have spent way too long pondering whether it's ethical to flirt with the super hot grad student who keeps coming in to where i work to look at reels of microfilm that the lending library won't let us check out to him. this is all hypothetical, of course, because i am obviously not suave enough to flirt on the fly.

5. but that's all okay, because I have watched the pilot of White Collar ~~once~~ ~~twice~~ more than once and it more than makes up for the suavity that I lack. i have such an unreasonably gigantic crush on Neal, i cannot even deal. (have i ever mentioned that I really really like heist films?)

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:41:29 GMT

Obama is coming to my campus on Friday to talk about energy. (No, I'm not going - it's an auditorium that seats 1250, on a campus of 10,000 students. The odds were not in my favor.) We found out last night, and now everytime I go somewhere on campus, by the return trip there are signs up about buildings or rooms being closed on Friday. I'm hoping no one does anything stupid - mix a campus full of students who are long on ingenuity and short on common sense, who think they have a god-given right to be anywhere on campus, including roofs, tunnels, and shafts, with the Secret Service and things have the potential to go horribly horribly wrong. I'm sure I'm not nearly as excited about all of this as the Secret Service is, though. (I much prefer the president at a distance.)

I met with a professor today about grad school. (I haven't been posting about it, but I have been back and forth and yes and no on the grad school thing over the past several weeks.) "Let me give you a list of places you should think about," she told me. She gave me three to apply to for sure, and then a list of others to think about. She also warned me off some schools - "they have people doing interesting work, but their students don't go anywhere," she said. She also told me that I can't stay where I am - they almost never admit their own undergrads. "Not written in stone," she said, "but written in wet cement." Bah - I would have liked to stay here.

Finally: The problem with LJ: We all think we are so close, but really we know nothing about one another. So I want you to ask me something you think you should know about me. Something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about. Ask away.

ETA: Do you know what's amazing about syntax, the field? How often you'll be reading a paper on a contentious issue only to find "are you calling me racist?" and then the counter response will be "yes, I am!" or "no, you're just dumb". Were it not for the months-long delays, it would be prime f_w-style stuff.

the internet is full of questions

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 23:54:00 GMT

1. I am taking a class with professor A. He invites professor B to give a guest lecture. Then, on the homework assignment, prof A sets a problem based on prof B's lecture - a problem proposed by prof B. Only, last year I took a class from prof B and we covered this topic, and prof B is lazy so this question is one that was already assigned to me - and I typed all the homework for that class, so I still have my response from last time. It is ethical to copy and paste: yes/no/only if I note that that's what I've done.

2. I'm going to this conference on Saturday. It's required for one of my classes. It's a topic that I am interested in but not super knowledgeable about, and I'm an undergrad in a different field, so my goal is to sit in back, pay attention, and not embarrass myself. I don't need to network or impress anyone, but I would like to be sort of respectable-looking. What do I wear? Pictures or descriptions of clothing items I already own upon request.

3. Twice in the last week I've found myself looking for a particular word, and I can't work out what it should be. I need a word that describes a man that presents with many of the stereotypical qualities of a gay man, but I'd prefer it not say anything about sexuality, and that it have neutral or positive connotations. I would use 'camp', but that carries a connotation of performance of artifice that I'm not wild about for the contexts I want to use it in. For the parallel case of a woman, I might use 'butch'. Anyone got any suggestions?

4. I went to the MFA on Saturday with my mom while she was in town. The theme of our trip was 'creepy infants' (or possibly '~~things Laura hates about the MFA~~ poor display decisions on the MFA's part, in Laura's opinion'). I was going to write up some things about my Totally Uninformed Opinions About Art, but it loses something if I can't link to the works of art I'm talking to. This wouldn't be a problem, but we have to add 'their website' to the list of things I hate about the MFA, so it might take a while to pull together. Seriously, if I look up a work of art and you tell me whether it's on display and where, why can't I get a list of everything on display in a certain room, rather than having to look through every fucking painting, on a website that takes a minute and half to load each page, in order to find the one I want?

tell rock and roll i'm alone again

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 07:20:33 GMT

1. FULL VERSION OF ALPHADOG AND OMEGALOMANIAC!!!!! YOU GUYS, I AM SO EXCITED!!! this was my favorite song on the mixtape and I am thrilled to get the whole thing! \o/\o/\o/\o/\o/

2. I spent the (long!) weekend reading the first three Kushiel books, and I have requested the next three from the library. I should probably feel shame about this, but I don't, because they are sort of a lot of fun. No one told me there was politics! and intrigue! and pining! (I was warned about the kinky sex, but fandom has corrupted my standards to the point where I'm like "....really? that's what gets labeled porny these days?")

3. love meme!

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 16:42:28 GMT

I woke up this morning to discover that Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize. Now, I'm a pretty big fan of the dude, but, uh, what the hell just happened?

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 03:26:15 GMT

SHOW! IT IS BACK!

Things I liked about this episode: EVERYTHING

in no particular order:
-Hotch, you have the same day planner as me.
-REID!!! EVER SO CONVENIENTLY SITTING IN EVERY SHOT
-Reid!!! Facing down the unsub and getting conveniently shot in the knee! And then telling the surgeon that he's fine, go save the other guy, and just sort of hanging out in the grass.
-EMILY! Trying to keep her team focused by not telling them about Hotch!
-Morgan with kids!
-Morgan's job is to kick down doors!

Also, this might have just been me, but I was getting really weird vibes from that scene with Hotch and the unsub. Which only got worse when the unsub started taking his clothes off. And then whatever that line was, about how the profile says that stabbing is a metaphorical rape used when the murderer is impotent, and how he was going to fuck with the profile by stabbing Hotch? the only way that fucks with the profile is if the unsub is in fact not impotent, which, uh, you know what, I'll let you finish that line of thought yourself.

oops

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 02:27:39 GMT

Today was the second day of fencing, which, delightful! Only not really because we're still doing lots of running and lunges and squats and oh god my quads and glutes and hamstrings. But I was prepared for that! I knew that I would have to go places very slowly and avoid unnecessary stairs for a while - I've done this before, I know how it goes, I can handle that.

Except, there's one thing the sabre squad has a reputation for (other than the *ahem* efficiency of our parties) and it's the rate at which we get injured. Once, the entire women's sabre squad was injured at once. I had chronic shin splints my freshman year, which meant I had to go to practice 20 minutes early every day so I could get taped from the ball of my foot to my knee. Someone concussed herself walking into a door. Someone broke their wrist in a relay game. Someone spent 80% of their freshman year out with injuries, and on crutches for a fair bit of it.

Which is to say, in keeping with the tradition of really stupid injuries I did something* to my ankle at practice today. While playing pickup basketball, which is a sport I don't even understand. I hate the world.

*I'm sure that's the correct medical term. I landed funny and it hurt, but I could walk without pain after practice. After I sat down when I got home is when I first suspected that this was going to be trouble.

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 03:05:52 GMT

I am still sick and still pissed off about it. On the other hand, I'm about 80% recovered, which is nice, especially since it means that I can say I probably didn't have swine flu. (it's been going around. I think it's only a matter of time, frankly.) (I went sore throat/congestion/runny nose/loss of voice/more congestion/cough, in about that order. One of my friends came up to me and was like, "I have what you have! Headache and achy bones, right?" and I had to break the sad news to him that he did not have a cold like me.)

Today was also the first day of fencing practice, which, &fencing;. I shouldn't have gone, in retrospect - it was a lot of jogging, calisthenics, stretching, and so forth and there was some not-so-okay breathing sounds happening by the end. but, &fencing;

In less sickly news, I went on adventure this weekend! Okay, it was not a very grand adventure, but there was live theater! A friend of mine, and fellow bitter mathematician, had heard about a show called Truth Values, which is an autobiographical show about a woman who left math grad school to go into theater. There was pretty much no reason not to go once we found out that the Arts Office would give us free tickets. (Of course, we had to go to the Arts Office to pick them up, which is staffed by very friendly, very enthusiastic women who wanted to tell us all about all the programs they offer.) I enjoyed it a lot - my favorite part of the show was when she talked about her Fashion Experiments, when she wore more and more outlandish outfits to work to see how badly her male colleagues would react. It runs one more week, and I would probably recommend it, if you're local and into that sort of thing.

Goddammit, I was going to post this entry and I was interrupted by the fire alarm. That would be annoying enough under normal circumstances, but we had a fire drill not two hours ago. >:(

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 02:19:10 GMT

1. I'm sick. I hate being sick, and I'm not very good at it. Luckily, I don't get sick very often, but it means that when I have a cold like I do now, it leads to a lot of metaphorical blank stares at my body for letting me down.

2. I opened up the pdfs of all my readings for next week, and I've been slowly working through them, but I keep opening up new articles about Piraha instead. This all is the fault of my syntax TA.

2a. I went to the optional syntax recitation on Friday, thinking I might get a chance to ask some kind of off-the-wall questions that I didn't want to derail the lecture with. Since I was the only person to show up, I got to spend 45 minutes asking questions about whatever i wanted that was even tangentally related to the lecture. i win.

2b. This is why I have all this reading about Piraha - the prof mentioned that there are claims that Piraha is a language without recursion (which in turn means that a lot of UG would have to be rethought) and so the TA and I spent 15 minutes talking about what it would take to show something doesn't have recursion and so forth. We concluded that we are sort of skeptical about lots of things that Everett claims. (The dude argues that the Piraha people - who are a very isolated people in the Amazon - don't count, don't make art, don't have recursion, and don't talk about things that are not present. When anthropologists make claims about the people they have discovered and how they are new! and different! and Other! I get very skeptical.)(Also, I'm a pretty strong believer in a lot of the syntax that Chomsky has done, so I'm skeptical for those reasons too.)

3. I also asked about the thing I was talking about in my last post, which the stress differences on nouns and verbs.

The reason it came up in class was as part of a claim that English has lots of markers that tell you about what part of speech a word is. Which is true! There are lots of morphological markers - things like -cally and -ly and -ed and so forth. This particular example was about how the same word can be a verb or a noun and one of the ways you can tell is by the stress pattern. Verbs go weak-strong, and nouns go strong-weak.

My argument was that while some of the pairs showed that pattern, there were some that either didn't in the verbs (in my speech, at least), or that I produced either way. (The nouns were all still strong-weak). The TA agreed, and we came to the conclusion that while this pattern holds in many cases, it's not universally true. There was a fair bit of making up of words and trying to decide whether they worked better as nouns or verbs. In addition, we think that this distinction might be being lost, and that it might be more common among older speakers, but that it probably doesn't correspond to any particular dialect or dialects.

4. In retrospect, my first clue that I wasn't feeling well should have been the sudden desire to watch or re-watch huge chunks of Grey's Anatomy. Oh, self.

ETA: Dude, actual quote from the paper I'm reading: "In this paper, we disagree with Everett on every one of these points. Indeed, the simplest summary of the present article can be obtained by placing a negation in front of each claim summarized above. Some of Pirahã's supposed "inexplicable gaps" (both linguistic and cultural) will be argued to be illusory or non-existent. The remaining inguistic "gaps" will turn out to be (in all likelihood) real, but shared with anguages as diverse as German, Chinese, Hebrew, Wappo and Adyghe. Since these are languages spoken within cultures that do not share the key properties of Pirahã culture as described by Everett, no arguments for Everett's "startling" or "severe" conclusions will remain."

FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT

skeptical laura is skeptical

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 22:10:29 GMT

In my syntax class, my professor made a claim that made me raise an eyebrow and write "....really?" in my notes. I'll probably be harassing all the people I know in RL about this question too, but it'd be awesome if you have a few minutes to take a poll and satisfy my curiosity. Behind the cuts are five pairs of sentences, then a couple of questions about each pair (as well as a couple of demographic questions).

The Sentences
1a. I'm going to record your answers.
1b. I found an old record in my attic.

2a. We hope to increase the number of students.
2b. There's been an increase in our funding.

3a. I don't want to torment you with these questions.
3b. That class was a great torment to me.

4a. I'm trying to transfer departments.
4b. I'm the new transfer in this office.

5a. We're going to protest this change.
5b. I'm going to the health care protest tomorrow.

Now, if I were actually gathering linguistic data in any sort of real method, I would ask you to read out loud them to me so I could record what you say, but this is not real data gathering, just me satisfying my own curiosity. Hence, a poll. Each question refers to the different ways stress and emphasis can be placed on a given sentence. I am interested in which result best describes how you place the stress in ordinary, casual speech.

View Poll: #1458997

I would of course also be interested in any other data or feelings about the questions that you might have - if, for example, one of the options makes you think of a particular dialect, region, speaker, etc.

I have a theory, but I'm not sure it'll be borne out by the data. When I get back from class tonight, I'll write a few sentences up about it and leave them in comments (as not to bias poll takers).

DUDE. DUDE.

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 20:30:11 GMT

I GET TO LEARN UYGHUR THIS TERM. It's our language for the Field Methods class I'm taking, so we sit around for three hours a week with a cool dude who's a native speaker, asking questions like, "so, what if it's plural? How would you say 'the birds fly'?" and he tells us and then we try to work out the grammar. It's super interesting and there's no regularly assigned work - we have a final project where we get to explore one aspect of the language, but that's pretty much it. And it's the most ridiculous class - it's co-taught by a professor and a grad student, plus the native speaker, and then there are a grand total of three students. I was worried I was going to be missing some background, but I have the most background of any of the three, so that should be fine.

I also had Spanish today, which is going to be a long hard slog, but I knew that going into it. I'm much more excited about knowing Spanish than learning Spanish. The other class I had today was Intro to Ancient and Medieval Studies, which looks like it will be a mixed bag - it's taught by three professors, one who I've had before and really liked, one who seems a little blah, and one who seems incredibly young, incredibly enthusiastic, and incredibly queer. It's also interesting to put faces to names, since two of the three would be in a list of top 10 users of ILB, although I did have the good sense not to go "oh, so you're the dude who once returned 40* books all at once!" when they introduced themselves.

*not an exaggeration. I was left wondering how he got them all from point A to point B.

complaning about school and request for recipe recs

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:54:09 GMT

Curses, school, why must you cancel the classes I want to take in the week before classes start? My schedule was beautiful and perfect and now it isn't. :(

I was going to take Science of Race, Sex, and Gender on TTh afternoon, but it got canceled. On the other hand, they've added Psychology of Gender and Race, which sounds like a reasonable substitute, but it's on Thursday evening, which means ducking out of fencing early so I can get to class, and then being stuck in class for 3 hours during my prime dinner-eating, homework-doing time. Argh. On the other hand, I have no classes on Friday, so it's not like I'd need to be doing work during that time - can't have anything due if you're not in class. (Well, you can. But it's unlikely.)

I'd have to pack a meal, though. Anyone got any good suggestions for what I should take? Fine print: I have lots of tupperware. I do not currently have a cold pack, thermos, or insulated lunch box but those would all be reasonably easy to get. I'd be looking for enough food to count as a full meal, but since I'd be eating it during class I'd prefer it to be easy to eat and not too distracting or strong-smelling. Since I won't be in class in the afternoons, I'll have access to a full kitchen to do prep work, after which it has to stay reasonably foodsafe for 3 to 5 hours, and I could also prep and freeze things the night before. Already on my list are things like fruit, crackers, cheese, and deli meats, but I'm looking for more ideas if anyone has them.

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 02:32:28 GMT

1. My workplace finally figured out why my paychecks stopped arriving a few weeks ago. (Because I have direct deposit and I am less than stellar about monitoring my finances, it took me a few weeks to catch on, so it's not like it was a mystery for weeks, just a few days.) Actually, that's not quite true - the best explanation I've gotten is "sometimes the system just does crazy shit" - but at least I am getting paid again, which I feel is the crucial point in all of this.

2. Magnetic Monopoles Detected In A Real Magnet For The First Time - I was really disappointed that this title slightly exaggerates what they did find. In related news, I have long regretted that I missed out on buying one of the tshirts that the physics department was selling a few years ago, with the magnetic monopole version of Maxwell's equations on the front and "We believe" on the back.

3. I want to steal Neil Gaiman's library. Do you think he would mind?

dammit, brain

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 05:12:08 GMT

Sometimes, I wonder if linguistics is what I want to do. Am I making the right choice? Will I regret this later? I ask myself. (tbf, this has more to do to with my inability to let any moment for ~~self-doubt~~ self-reflection pass than anything else.)

And then I spend a couple hours reading a book** about artificial languages, and then a few hours more digging through the citations*, and I go, yeah, okay, this is what I want.

*Look, they were talking about native speakers of Esperanto. Native speakers! of an artificial language! I spent much of the next few chapters wondering about how that worked and whether the native speakers spoke differently than non-native speakers, and what parts of speech changed, and whether it was similar to the process of creolization of a pidgin (except it's creolization of a language!), and when I saw there were citations I pulled up JSTOR and LLBA so fast, you have no idea.

**The book is called "In the Land of Invented Languages", by Arika Okrent, and I'd tell you it was delightful, but I'm pretty sure I'd say any book on this topic was delightful even if it were in fact terrible. Not that this book is, I think, but I will admit that I am in a bad place to judge its broader appeal. (I will say that I found its tone very refreshing, in light of recent events - Okrent approaches some rather offbeat subcultures and treats them with respect and interest, to the point of making friends, going to conlang conferences, and learning good chunks of Klingon and Esperanto. protip: if you want to do social science and market your book to the general public, this is how you should do it. koff koff.)

in which boston ups the ante (or, I'm glad I'm not moving this weekend)

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 01:56:56 GMT

This is weekend is, as anyone familiar with Boston knows, Moving Weekend, when some huge fraction of the population takes to their U-Hauls, not to mention the massive influx of college students. Then, of course, into the neighborhoods most affected by Moving Weekend, you throw a major entertainment draw, a Red Sox game, and a a carnival with parade, and you have a weekend full of traffic disasters, but not that out of the usual for Boston at this time of the year.

Now add in the funeral for a beloved local politician, which poses special security hurdles because the president will be there (not to mention all the living former presidents and half the Senate) (and "security hurdles" means "street closings" and "motorcades").

Did I mention that Boston's also going to get hit by a hurricane this weekend?

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 05:02:55 GMT

Hello flist! I feel like I have been gone for a very long time, but this is probably because I am at home for a while and that's always a little weird after being away, especially since I keep finding points where my politics differ from my family's politics and that's awkward. (Also, surprising, because I think of my family as nice liberal people who get together over Thanksgiving to talk shit about Coleman, and I don't see myself as particularly far-left, but it's possible that I actually am.) And I had a very serious discussion with my brother about Torchwood, which, what?

Speaking of fannish things, I wanted to get more into the habit of talking about fandom on my LJ, because I like fandom and I like being in fandom. So, meme! Ask me my fannish Top Five [Whatevers]. Any top fives. Doesn't matter what, really! And I will answer them all in a new post.

baaaaand

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 07:20:45 GMT

IT MIGHT BE POSSIBLE THAT I AM GRINNING SO HARD MY FACE MIGHT BREAK. I'M JUST SAYIN'.

:DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 23:55:11 GMT

I am behind on all sorts of things I meant to comment on or get back to people about. If you are one of them, you should probably remind me.

1. There are two different discussions about cover art going on right now in the SFF part of the internet. One of them is mature, well-reasoned, and talking about the ways whitewashed covers perpetuate systemic racism. The other one is about using women's bodies to sell magazines and has Harlan Ellison in it.

2. My co-worker has finally figured out what to do with the Royal Mail bags. The library has a softball team that plays in the on-campus summer league, which is mostly made up of staff and grad students. My co-worker is one of the organizers of the team, which means he brings refreshments (ie, beer). The Royal Mail bags are to disguise the fact that the office fridge is full of beer.

3. Someone make me stop reading articles about Gates, especially the ones about the police's responses, before my head explodes. NO NO NO WRONG IN REAL LIFE, CAMBRIDGE PD.

4. I was writing last night, and things went in a direction I wasn't expecting, and later I was talking to myself about it, and I said something like "[character] really surprised me! I had no idea he'd do that!" and then I promptly hated myself for being one of those writers who treats their characters like they are real people.

5. I listen to Pandora a lot, and the station I've been listening to recently is mostly made up of really catchy pop sung by women - Pink, Lady Gaga, Britney, Rihanna, Shakira, and so on. (If my taste in music causes you to despair, you should stop reading the post now, because it only gets worse from here.) when I'm listening, I casually thumb songs up or down as the mood strikes me. Yesterday, I went through and looked up a few of the songs I'd been enjoying. Among them: a song by a Christian rock band that's probably about rejecting the mainstream and loving jesus, a song featuring vocals from the leader singer of Nickelback, and a Eurovision song. I may have to go die of shame now.

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 22:57:25 GMT

I have, like, a collection of book reviews floating around. Here, have them all at once. (The astute reader may notice a theme.)

The Song of Arbonne

whoa. It's a Kay book in which everybody gets what they deserve. It ends well for the good guys! badly for the bad guys! an actual happy ending, instead of the ending you only thought you wanted, or the ending with the twist of the knife. my mind, it is blown. I think the black-and-white of it makes it a weaker book, though.

The other interesting thing about this book is what Kay does with gender and power. You've got the women's sphere of power, the Court of Love, which is headed by a woman and is hugely influential on internal politics, and then you've got the men's sphere of power, all the dukes and their armed men - and the leader of the men's sphere is a woman. In the north, you've got the patriarchy-is-us culture, and the woman whose name i have forgotten who ups and leaves rather than be a pawn for her father. because she is awesome.

The Last Light of the Sun

I should have listened to thesamefire! In my mind, this is one of the weakest of Kay's books. I never really got a good grasp on the politics and kept wanting a key: which one of you are the Welsh again? It reminds me a little in plot of Lions of Al-Rassan, but what made that book so powerful was the sense of inevitability to it, that there was only one way it could end, that it had to be this way. The Last Light of the Sun, on the other hand, feels like all the characters are wandering around in the dark until they meet up and have the climatic confrontation.

The Fionavar Tapestry

Okay, this is super-classic high fantasy, complete with people from our world being the Chosen Ones, and there are really no words for how much that is not my thing. At the end of the first book, I was unimpressed. At the end of the second book, I was still unimpressed, but the addition of Arthurian legend meant there was no way I could not read the third (it's one of my die-hard plot kinks (you're a tragedy waiting to happen)). At the end of the third, I was crying like a baby. Goddammit, Kay, how do you do that?

Ysabel

This is really not like Kay's other works at all. It's modern day, set in France, about a teenage boy who stumbles into supernatural doings. I was a little put off by the narrative voice at the beginning, which felt like Kay was trying too hard to get the 15-year old thing right - "I'm 15! I'm totally unimpressed by my summer in France! I'm hip and carry an iPod!" - but either I got used to it or it got toned down quickly, because it didn't bother me after about 30 pages. This pretty much coincides with the supernatural stuff that starts happening, a bunch of which is genuinely creepy (at least to me - I have the world's lowest tolerance for horror) and really engrossing.

One of this book's major flaws is that it didn't end in a threesome, though. (Not with the 15-year old. That would be weird.)

One thing that I thought Kay handled well was an issue of protecting the womenz - the main character's mother works for Doctors Without Borders and keeps going into war zones to work. Her husband and son are a little freaked out by this, but limit themselves to saying "we know this is important to you, but we're worried about your safety; please be careful" rather than forbidding her from going. Her brother-in-law, who as far as I can tell is a professional badass, gets a job working for MSF and follows her when she goes places that are really bad (she's never met him because of bad blood between her and her sister, so she doesn't know who he), and the attitude of everyone who knows about this is "that's super creepy and she's going to be so mad" rather than "that's so noble!" and when she finds out, her reaction is "that's totally creepy and as soon as this crazy shit stops happening to my kid, I'm going to be super mad" rather than "*swoon*", which I found refreshing.

And now I am working on the new book by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, which is interesting but super slow going and a bit of an adventure, kind of like charades. 'you are ...going to a bar? no, no, to a brothel!' I am currently on pace to finish it in November or so, which is not good.

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 19:52:43 GMT

I am so excited that Leverage is back, guys, you don't even know. This episode was not one of my favorites, but that does nothing to dampen my enthusiasm.

First up, the bad:
-this episode, and presumably the entire season, is set in Boston. Oh honey, no. You're filming in Portland. Portland is a perfectly good city. Why not set it in Portland? (I hate watching movies/tv set anywhere I know, especially if they're not filmed there.* I am mentally girding myself for geography fail, although this episode only had one scene that made me go "....really?" fyi: I seriously doubt there is that much empty road pavement in the financial district during the day. quite frankly, I doubt there is that much road in the financial district, although it's a part of the city I'm not super-familiar with. Boston is not a city of wide well-ordered roads.)
-The credits sequence.
-This con never really clicked for me, and there were a bunch of moments where I felt the flashbacks were heavy-handed (especially the ones at the end establishing the briefcase, when it was two clips we had already seen - I actually was paying attention, Leverage) and the reveals were obvious (when Eliot got 'shot', I immediately went "oh, it's the mini-explosives they used earlier").
-Look, a list of things I don't really care about:
1. Nate's alcoholism
2. Nate's moral quandaries - 'am i a good guy or a bad guy? do the ends justify the means? is it okay to break the law to help people?' First, we did this last season. Second, shit or get off the pot, buddy.
3. Nate Ford.

(On the other hand, one of the mobsters who was roughing him up knew him - something like 'you're Bobby Ford's kid. Weren't you going to be a priest?' and I would be absolutely interested in hearing about how Nate's possible family or childhood experiences with organized crime affects #2 up there.)

The good, the delightful, and the awesome:
-every moment Parker or Hardison were on screen.
-Parker as a nun
-The team slowly moving in to Nate's apartment and totally denying it.
-Hardison buying the building and 'renovating'
-Eliot carrying explosives in his pants.
-Parker stealing the Hope Diamond and then putting it back!
-"I hacked into the White House's email. You know we're doing some bad stuff in Pakistan?" [...] "I was in Pakistan." !

In conclusion, I am super looking forward to the rest of the season.

*Except the Mighty Ducks movies, which are great fun to watch if you're from Minneapolis and can play spot the location.

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 19:51:10 GMT

Is it something about summer, do you think, that makes work slightly more odd than usual?

1. Someone sent us a record today. A record, 33 1/3 rpm vinyl record. I sure hope the patron didn't really need that recording.

2. The office got a letter addressed to Mr/Mrs [boss's first name] [boss's last name]. My boss is named Katie.

3. A library sent us a book entitled "Breaking the Jewish Code" which is by an evangelical Christian and promises to teach you how to use the secrets of the Jewish people to obtain wealth, health, and good fortune. Because those are all things I know I think of when I think of the historical experience of the Jewish people! There was a lot of O.o around the office, and we were relieved to learn that it had been mis-sent to us and our patron was looking for something entirely different.

4. One of my co-workers checked his email, then announced to the office at large, "[patron] is mad as hell and she's not going to take it anymore!"

5. I came into work today to find my boss doing "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" at her desk. No, I don't know either.