Good things about today: Wendy Davis' filibuster was successful, DOMA shot down, Tom and Lorenzo posted their "Mad Style" for the Mad Men finale and it was of course great.
Bad things about today: My money situation has gotten pretty bleak, and I have to try to get a second tutoring job or something to even it out. Particularly frustrating because I just lost kind of a lot of weight and a bunch of my clothes don't fit right anymore, but I have to tough it out with them awhile longer. I want my teen romance dorky-girl makeover montage though, damnit!
I just did this exact thing, and so now we are twins (the reading of The Big Sleep, not the popcorn -- I brought cheese and crackers for lunch and ate the cheese even though it was un-refrigerated in my purse for like an hour).
This morning, I woke up with my roommate's new kitten under my covers cuddling with my foot, so I've been in a pretty good mood all day.
I'm also restless, though, because it's for sure summer and I'm single, so I've gone sort of boy-crazy and I want to be out everywhere drinking all the beer and making out with strangers or something. That's what people do in the summer right? I will probably end up mostly reading books in a bathing suit in the backyard, though.
Yeah, Apartment Tiger is right, it was in season 2 -- I guess the point of it is to keep Cersei from becoming too dark too soon? But I feel like her ruthlessness in ordering her hated dead husband's bastards killed is very in line with her character. It's also funny that Cersei's accusations about Margaery don't seem to be totally made up in the series, since (spoilers!) TV Margaery heavily implies she's not a virgin, which in the books Cersei suspects but the reader doesn't really have any reason to believe.
I think that Littlefinger is one of the most confusing characters in the series, really, because in whatever weird way his feelings for Cat and Sansa are genuine, yet they lead him into becoming such a twisted individual. (Book spoilers!) I can understand why Sansa starts to view him as two separate people, the kind Petyr she wants to believe is her savior and the Machiavellian Littlefinger that she knows he also is.
The Ros thing I feel weird about also, because the series really has set out to make Joffrey a sort of more matured kind of evil than he needs to be. The fact that he's the one in the show to order the deaths of all of Robert's bastards, instead of Cersei, kind of threw me for a loop. Like, isn't the whole point that Joffrey has no idea that Robert wasn't his father, so he has no idea those bastards are a threat to him?
And honestly, even without killing Ros, everyone's going to hate Joffrey. All the viewers have hated him since he attacked Micah, right? And his beating of Sansa, and little shit like when he chops his wedding gift for Tyrion in half and names his sword Widow's Wail (truly the douchiest name you could give a sword).
It's because compared to all the people around him (like the Tullys, Cat's family), he had basically no land and a tiny keep, and he's also not a very large man. And because he grew up being fostered with the Tullys, and Cat's younger brother Edmure is kind of a dick.
Today I had a healthy-ish burrito that I assembled at my desk: cuban black bean dip, quinoa, avocado, butter lettuce. It sort of makes up for the fact that last night my dinner was two slices of watermelon and a bunch of cashews.
I don't recommend making a burrito at your desk unless you're prepared to get some disapproving looks from your coworkers, though.
Thank you for telling me to look this dude up, because melancholic adventurer with a great beard is my type of dude: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1c/Kermit_Roosevelt_Amazon_Expedition_1913.jpg
Mt. Pleasant! My hand-map was probably distorted by the fact that I kinda squish my thumb in to look more like the state when I do it.
I live in LA now, and sometimes I'll end up behind someone with MI plates in traffic; I always want to wave at them and then start pointing emphatically at my hand to remind them of home.
Today I got a t-shirt that displays a cafeteria-style bottle of ketchup and one of mustard, so today is going GREAT.
I also went to a "kirtan" last night, which was surprisingly lovely despite the fact I have 0 beliefs in basically anything. It took place after a dance class that involved a prodigious amount of booty-shaking, so maybe that added to the atmosphere of 30 somewhat sweaty and tired ladies singing Sanskrit chants together. I'd recommend it.
The end of that is actually that she wishes her worst enemy had the power to wish things into existence, instead of her, because all her wishes would come true in some literal but terrible way. However, then her worst enemy immediately wishes the main character would turn into a stork, so even the wish to not be able to make wishes screwed her over in the end.
It's so cool how much of my brain is taken up with the plots from YA fiction I read from 1993-1996. Anyone want to talk about Christopher Pike?
Augh still mad about that also! Totally not fair that Peter, who's older than Susan, would never lose faith in Narnia, but Susan would because she became one of those silly women-sorts. What about her amazing skills with archery? What's makeup got on being an ACTUAL QUEEN?
Worse than missing it entirely, I think, is how damned clever I thought I was for figuring out that Aslan was Jesus after reading the series* oh, a few hundred times or so. I was so sure I was going to blow some other kids' minds with that one.
*Except for The Last Battle, which I read exactly once, because surprisingly watching Narnia be destroyed and then finding out that three of the Pevensie children just died in a train crash was NOT delightful.
True! I do think that what Bran saw before was Lyanna and Benjen at Winterfell, so maybe he'll see them again. But probably only Howland Reed knows what happened at Harrenhal, and Martin has said we'll at least never get a P.O.V. from him because he knows too much for it to be interesting.
Slightly different: I just read the Dunk and Egg novellas, which are pretty good and interesting in terms of learning more about Westeros, but there's so much tourney stuff and heraldry in it that after I finished I started mentally designing my own. What's the next step, LARPing? I really hope the next step isn't LARPing.
Extreme nerd alert: Someone else had to explain this to me, but I really love the theory that Lyanna (aka Arya version 1.0) was the mystery knight at the Harrenhal tourney that went after the people who bullied Howland Reed, and it makes me sad that all the older Starks are dead (except Benjen?) so we'll never know much more about what they were like.
I also really, really want to know if it was Ned who was in love with/"bedded" Ashara Dayne or if it was Brandon.
Someone with more authority on the subject than myself recommended that I start "juicing" or something similar in order to increase my energy levels, so I'm sitting here at work waiting for a green smoothie I made at home and froze ahead of time to fully return to a liquid state. It's been like 7 hours, what the fuck is with the ice in this smoothie?
Thinking about having to drink it is turning my stomach, though, because kale and bananas and spirulina and apples and honey and celery and lemon juice don't mix, and I should have known that beforehand, but now I've wasted those perfectly good and tasty fruits and veggies in the creation of an evil green sludge that's taunting me with its grossness one arm's length away. I think it can sense my fear, you guys. If I end up dead tomorrow morning, please arrest this smoothie.
Tenth of December is great! The first and last stories were my favorites and a joy to re-read (both had previously appeared in the New Yorker). I definitely teared up reading them the second time through. Something about how he portrays life as so joyous and frail (I mean, not just that, but that in particular) really gets to me, although I tend to cry easily so YMMV.
As an adult lady, I had to get surgery for a retinal detachment. After the surgery, my eye looked kind of red and messed up, so I went around for a week or two wearing sunglasses and a contact in the other eye. I was dating someone new at the time, and to preserve whatever idea of attractiveness I think this person has of me, I keep the sunglasses on while we're having sex.
At some point, the guy says he's worried that he's going to do something, but I don't catch what that something is. So, I respond with, "Do you want to?" instead of asking him to repeat himself, because I thought that he was worried he was going to knock my sunglasses off.
What he had said, though, he was worried that he was going to pop my eye out. Which made my response extremely, extremely, extremely inappropriate.
In middle school, at this same crappy small Catholic school, we'd be allowed to mill around the combined gym/stage room during our lunch hour after we'd finished eating. Because it was a gym/stage, there was a collection of random weight lifting equipment back in a corner in the stage area. My best friend and I, goofing around, decide to try to lift up these weights. And so I pick a dumbbell whose weights haven't been secured on, and somehow BOTH fall off as soon as I pick the dumbbell up, making a very loud noise that echoes through the gym, thanks to the amazing acoustics of having a fucking stage and basketball court in the same goddamn room.
Not knowing what to do, I ran away to hide, but for some reason ran across the stage instead of further back into it, revealing to everyone in the gym just who had made the extremely loud noise. I still hid, though, and unfortunately did not die crouching back in the stairway down to the boys' locker room. BUT, this time I didn't cry OR fart, so in a way it was a small victory.
When I was but a girl, I went to a small Catholic school. Every year, we had to prepare songs to sing at a big Christmas concert/mass, and we'd get to leave our classroom and go practice in the church. I can't remember what grade this was, 5th or after?, but I'm in the church practicing with my entire grade, and someone does something apparently hysterical and we all laugh. And I laugh so hard I fart. And then everyone laughed more, so to rescue the situation and avoid further humiliation, I burst into tears.
You might be shocked to hear that I didn't have a lot of friends in elementary school.
The sun is shining and the weather is lovely and so spirits are high at my desk area, even though it turns out I have been targeted by an OFFICE THIEF, who dared to steal (among other things) a lb of coffee right off my desk. So, now I have to lock up my snacks and tea and whatever, which is extremely annoying, on top of the icky feeling of being thieved out of my #1 source of workplace caffeine.
Also, today I tried out a recipe for a berry-beet smoothie. I recommend it to everyone who likes the taste of raspberries and dirt.
I think my sentiment was not conveyed very well, as I realized halfway through I could finally flee my place of employment for the night. But what I meant was that for people who have to hear those questions over and over again, it's not so much simply annoying as something that can really wear a person down as they're continually "othered" by people who live in the same town, go to the same school, work the same jobs, and so on.
And I think at that point it becomes a question about whether or not keeping the person who just asked you a jackass of a question in good spirits is really worth your energy, or even if it is in any way your responsibility to do so. Unfortunately, societal mores being what they are, there's always a lot of pressure to act in a relatively polite fashion in the face of questions like these anyway, so a lot of the people who ask these sorts of questions probably don't have any inkling that what they're doing is offensive/rude, and on it goes.
Although I am also a big Mr. Tumnus fan, I can't say I support endless tolerance for the racially/culturally insensitive to the expense of the person who has to answer, for the thousand and first time, what piece of planet Earth their parents or grandparents happened to be born on. How do people learn that something is wrong unless they get some kind of negative reinforcement, after all?
My best friend since childhood is multiracial, and we happened to grow up in a very white part of the country. The worst part of that was that she got bullied as a kindergartener by some racist as hell high school students (Yes, that really fucking happened), but the lesser was having to answer to every new person she met what race/races she was, or endure them trying to guess her race, or (once, memorably) asking her "Are you China?" No, honey, no she is not.
Actually I should probably have said that there are a few jokes re: Jamaica that are extremely pervasive -- if you asked a very large amount of people what they knew about Jamaica, the list would probably go something like: 1) Weed 2) Bob Marley 3) ?.
From what position are you arguing that nobody really thinks that? There are a million and one jokes about Rastas and Jamaica in our culture, and the noise those things make drowns out the voices of actual Jamaicans. To say that most people carry around a parody-esque idea of Jamaicans but also discern that this stereotype isn't actually close to reality, especially concerning a group of people that many Americans have limited or no direct contact with, is a very tricky argument to make and not one I personally can believe.
She should be forced to confront the extreme amount of horribleness in "I Love My Friends" until her narcissism finally shatters and she achieves self-awareness and, perhaps, nirvana.
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