A Few Uncollected Thoughts

I wanted to watch Jim Cramer on The Daily Show - in fact, I've been loving the whole pundit war all week - but in the end, I just couldn't. Thirty seconds into the clip I had to stop the video. I have too much of an embarrassment squick, and it made me horribly uncomfortable. Cramer and CNBC may have done a lot of stupid, even unethical stuff, but...I feel bad for him. I know, I know, it's dumb. But hey, I'm the person who walked away from Disney movies wishing they'd gone a littl easier on the villains, and those are not movies known for their moral ambiguity. I always feel sorry for the bad guys, even when I know they really were bad. I'm just weird that way. I guess I'll just have to content myself with reading people in RBR flail over what an amazing interview it was. *shrugs*

Tonight is all-nighter night, go me for failing at time management. I have twelve hours to write 8 pages about how doppelgangers are used differently in Frankenstein and The Handmaid's Tale. Wooo. I think I do actually have a vague thesis - in Frankenstein, the monster is a dark inversion of Victor - both his double and his son, attacking and destroying everything he loves - whereas in The Handmaid's Tale, the various character who act as a skewed mirror to Offred serve to show the different paths her life could take, from wife to whore to impotent revolutionary. In both cases, other characters are used to show us more about the main character, but in very different ways. But I really don't have any direct textual evidence to back myself up DDDD:

I'm hoping to get the epic job hunting of doom over with all quick when I go home next week, and then I will have a whole long week to myself to FUCKING SLEEP OMG and kick around and work on the unpacking of doom and maybe even get some writing done, that would be amazing. If I could finish the de-aging fic (about halfway done right now) and the 5 Things About Tony fic (4/5 done) I would feel really good about myself. And I'm already plotting out new stuff. What I'd really kind of like to do, right at the moment, is the Boostle hurt/comfort fic about Booster getting sick because his 25th Century immune system can't deal with all these germs in our time. But I'm not sure right now - it could go in one of two ways, I think.

Whch would be more interesting? The rather darkish (for Boostle, anyway) story where Booster gets horribly ill and they don't know how to treat him and think he's going to die of what would be just a cold for most people and have to do something drastic to save his life? Or the lighter, more cracky story where he is delusional from fever, so he barricades himself in someone else's room and starts taking pot shots at Justice League members until Ted talks him down? Both could be fun...

GAH BACK TO PAPER WRITING GAAAAAAH.

Sorry, Sorry, It's Late

So apparently my roommate is a nervous cleaner. In the last week, she's taken to emptying both our trash cans every single day, and developing a distressing habit of vacuuming the room at three in the morning.

On the one hand, it's nice to have the room clean, and I'm certainly not very good at it (it just doesn't occur to me to vacuum! Or dust!).

But on the other hand - VACUUMING. AT THREE IN THE MORNING. WHY.

Also, I do not like people moving my stuff, or doing things to my stuff. *is territorial* I don't care that my desk is a disaster area, hands off!

Also also, my paper is somehow turning out to be about how Frankenstein and the Handmaid's Tale are connected by their nature as feminist texts but different because Handmaid's Tale goes with the assumption of female agency. And their doppelgangers prove this. Somehow. Argh how am I going to finish this?

The Icon Speaks For Itself

I JUST TURNED IN MY PAPER, GO ME.

It's a little under length, and totally lacking in direct quotations, but I think not utter rubbish - I had a fairly solid thesis and I backed it up more or less. Not my best work, but considering that for one of my classes winter quarter last year I completely lost it and didn't even turn in my final paper - eh, I'm doing okay. Wish I had started earlier, but I never do. Now I'm just going to do a quick thing for my writing class - just a short story analysis, hopefully won't take more than an hour, and then it is SWEET MERCIFUL SLEEP.


Also, have the intro to my essay. Because while the rest of it is distinctly meh, I'm kind of proud of this, especially considering I'd already been awake like 20 hours when I wrote it.

In both Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the authors create characters who act as doppelgangers for their protagonists. In Frankenstein, the monster is a perverse inversion of his creator; he exposes Victor’s dark side, attacks the things he loves, and drags him down into destruction. In Atwood’s novel, Offred in effect has two doubles, each showing a different path she could have taken: on the one side is the Commander’s wife Serena Joy, respected, powerful, but barren and miserable, and on the other is Moira, who enjoys a measure of freedom only because she has sold herself into prostitution. These are very different approaches to the concept of the doppelganger, but in each novel they share a common purpose. For both Shelley and Atwood, the doppelganger serves as a tool to address the theme of women’s role in a sexist society. That they are presented in such dramatically different forms is indicative of the changing societies that produced them. Shelley, writing in the 19^th Century, uses the doppelganger in her story to declare the eminent importance of women as mothers and nurturers of life by showing how life created free of a mother is monstrous. Atwood, writing in the 1980s, writes to a society where women enjoy a far greater agency, and rather than embracing the power of motherhood Offred’s story is an argument for the power of women to choose – to be mothers or not be mothers, but in either case to act of their own will and not by coercion and law. 

Let it be noted that the more sleep-deprived I am, the more...stentorial my writing gets. According to , by 9.00 am I'm practically declaiming.