Love In The Asylum

Quiz time! This Wednesday afternoon was:

a. The busiest time of the day (noon to stock market close at 4.00 PM)

b. The busiest day of the week (everyone is getting their proofs in to be set up to go out on Thursday, which is the end of the week as far as financial news is concerned)

c. The busiest day of the month (1st of the month, when all the car companies and retail stores send in their monthly sales report tables)

d. The busiest day of the quarter (3rd week of earnings, 40-50 releases full of big ugly financial tables moving through along with our regular massive load of copy)

e. THE DAY OUR COMPUTER SYSTEM IRREVOCABLY CRASHED FOR TWO HOURS.

So, yeah, that was kind of the shitty capstone on a horrendously long week. It was awful - we couldn't send anything out, couldn't work on releases, couldn't open orders or see incoming orders, nothing to do but sit there and panic about the deadlines we were missing. And then the rest of the day (and most of Thursday too) the whole office was just in a tailspin trying to recover. Needless to say, by the end of my shift tonight I was about ready to crawl under a rock and die. Sometimes I really wonder about this field that I have somehow fallen into.

(But I had a very nice birthday, my dad made me dinner and got me a basket for my bike, and the awesome people I RPG with made me cake and gave me a lovely dice set. And this weekend I am going mattress shopping with my mom, because I am finally about to graduate to a big girl bed, i.e. moving past the twin-size daybed I've had since I was twelve. So it's not all doom and gloom! Just, fuck, this month at work needs to be over already)

Things That I Have Found While Looking For My Insurance Card (before my doctor's appointment on Monday):

- my of-no-use-whatsoever insurance cards from freshman and sophomore year (when the school used a different insurance provider)
- a five dollar giftcard for Starbucks (which is unused because I don't like Starbucks, or for that matter COFFEE)
- my pay card from when I worked at the movie theater (for three weeks, three years ago)
- a 30 yuan phone card only useful in China (and not actually terribly useful there because I never figured out how to make international calls)
- a bank card with someone else's name on it (I think Freshman Guy must have dropped it when he was storing my stuff over the summer)
- a rather keen hat

Things I Have Not Found (sing along if you know the words):

- MY INSURANCE CARD

Guess I'm calling the insurance company tomorrow. YAY.

PS: OMG, what a hot mess today's Champions League match was. I'm torn between being frustrated that Barca felt like they had to sink to RM's level and play such ugly football to win(I love my boys, but let's face it, they were diving all over the place), and just loling over all the DRAMA. Mourinho throwing a tantrum and getting sent off the pitch by the ref? Pep trolling Real Madrid by replacing David Villa with a 19-year-old from the B Team? Both squads getting put in time-out in their locker-rooms after the match so they wouldn't start brawling in front of the cameras? This match has everything. Fucking amazing.

Bleargh, I still have the plague. I am...not as much feeling better as getting to the place where I can still the possibility of better on the distant horizon. Maybe tomorrow I will start to feel like a human being again. I even begged off the commitment of working for my grandma tomorrow - even if I am feeling better I don't think I'll be up to doing that much, and my uncle would probably just try to quarantine me anyway so I don't breathe around Tiny Cousin. Whatever. I shall continue to lay about and play with my cookbook software instead.

Since I don't have the wherewithal for real content, here's a meme colourofsaying tagged me with.

♔ If you've been tagged, you must write your answers in your own LJ and replace any question that you dislike with a new question.
♔ Tag eight people. Don't refuse to do that. Don't tag who tagged you.

(Not tagging anyone, because that's too much work. Blah.)


1. What song are you currently addicted to?
Jonathan Coulton's The Princess Who Saved Herself. And Shawn Hlookoff's She Could Be You. ...shut up. I marathoned Kyle XY last week and it's a really addicting melody after awhile.

2. What books are you currently reading?
I've been working this summer on reading/rereading ever book Tamora Pierce has ever written. Right now I'm on The Woman Who Rides Like A Man and Bloodhound. I've never read the Beka Cooper books; I like them a lot more than I was anticipating, given that I'm not overly enamoured of first person. But it's good! I'm also reading TA Barron's Lost Years of Merlin series and McKillip's In The Forests of Serre. Non-fiction wise, I'm reading Francesca de Grandis' Goddess Initiation, very slowly.

3. What was the last movie you saw?
Iron Man 2 at the dollar theater on Sunday with my mom and the boyfriend. Still as fun as the first time. RDJ remains painfully hot in little hoodies and elbow sleeves. Before that, Despicable Me, which was precious

4. Anise or cinnamon?
Anise and cinnamon together! Mmmm, bizcochitos.

5. Cats or dogs?
Both! I just love animals, and we've always had both. But I don't think I'm responsible enough for a dog, so I'll probably be a cat person while I'm single.

6. What's your current fandom/obsession/addiction?
You may have noticed, but I cannot stop talking about Doctor Who. Aaaaah, I love Eleven SO MUCH. The new Sherlock series on BBC is impressing me with how quick the fandom's taken off, given we only got three episodes. Wonderful porn, but it needs more h/c. I'm also horrendously addicted right now to a Korean drama called Life is Beautiful - it's about a huge extended family that runs a hotel/diving tours on Jeju Island. There are approximately 11 million main characters and I am massively invested in all of them. But especially the serious oldest son, who is a) incredibly gorgeous and b) has the show's main dramatic arc, which is about the family trying to marry him off while he tries to keep them from finding out that he is gay and in a relationship with his photographer friend. I keep meaning to do an epic picspam post about how Tae Sub/Kyung Soo is the greatest thing ever and you should all watch this, but I haven't gotten around to it.

7. What's your favorite character/band member/actor etc?
Not sure I have one...I don't tend to notice actors or singers much. But I do love David Tennant and John Barrowman. And Sandra Oh. And Vienna Teng!

8. What side of the bed do you sleep on?
I either sprawl across the entire bed, or end up jammed in the corner closest the wall in a little curled up ball. I am an action sleeper.

9. What was the last thing you bought?
shampoo and leave-in conditioner at the health food store.

10. Would you rather date a good singer, or a good cook?
A good singer. I like people to be impressed with my cooking. And I can't sing at all, so I'm always really in awe of people who can keep in tune and have it sound good.

11. If you could only listen to one band or singer for the rest of your life who would it be?
Dar Williams, maybe. Heather Alexander. Seanan Mcguire. Any of my favorite female singers who have written a lot of songs, so I wouldn't get bored of the same songs over and over.

12. What do you do to change your mood?
I bake. Or watch mindless, fun television where nothing permanently bad happens. Or meditate, if I'm really upset and need to recollect.

13. What was the last meal you ate?
Leftover taquitas. I can't usually eat when I'm sick, so I've just been picking at whatever's in the fridge.

14. Do you want to learn another language?
I would like to re-learn Chinese, since I don't really remember any of it. And I'd like to learn Russian. And Welsh, although that will never happen.

15. Five things you can't live without.
books, the internet, my bed, my family, music
16. Find the closest book currently sitting near you and flip to page 54. What is the first sentence of the second paragraph?

"Chuang-tze, a classic writer on the Way of the Dao, tells of the life of a chef."

17. If you could go anywhere in the world right now, where would it be?
Right this second? Back to bed. The more general now? I would really like to visit London. I've never been to Europe, and that seems a good (and interesting!) place to start.

18. What are you looking forward to?
getting back to California and seeing my Stanford friends. Setting up house-keeping (and decorating with ridiculous posters!) in my new apartment. The Genre Fiction class I'm taking. :)

19. What is playing out of your speakers, right now?
Futurama clips. I've got too much of a headache still to focus on music, but dialogue is easier for some reason. And Futurama doesn't take a lot of work to enjoy.

Ugh, what a day.

The town's water main (apparently we only have one?) broke in the middle of the night last night, so when I woke up we had no running water. We did have drinking water, since we use a water cooler (decadent, yes, but you'd invest too if your arsenic levels were this high), but drinking water and no toilet is not the greatest combination ever. I ended up at my grandma's all afternoon, scrubbing showers and washing window blinds and putting curtains up and just generally getting sweaty and filthy. Since we still didn't have water at 4.00 when I got home, my dad vetoed cooking dinner on the grounds that we wouldn't be able to do dishes afterwards, so we went for take-out instead. Unfortunately all the fast-food/take-out places near us were closed, because the water was out for the whole town, and he didn't want to go into a sit-down restaurant without being able to take a shower. So we ended up driving for an hour through rush-hour traffic to get fried chicken in Albuquerque.

We finally got our water back a few minutes ago (about 16 hours after it went out - nice job, Bernalillo). And I am sticky and headachey and grumpy and exhausted, so I am going to take a damn shower and curl up with Jeeves and Wooster and just...not think for a while. Possibly I will just go to bed altogether.

People Who Are Pissing Me Off Today:

1. Asshole grad students who don't give back to their school and don't even have the decency to tell me no. I am so fucking sick of getting hung up on just because people think you are allowed to be a jerk to me over the phone. BE FEBRUARY NOW.

2. Idiots in the Democratic Party who don't know how to win elections, or what to do with the government once they've won after all. BE MORE INCOMPETENT DEMS. Also the idiots in Massachusetts who voted for Brown because Coakley doesn't know baseball players or what the fuck ever.

3. People on the internet trying to defend their experiences/pre-conceived narratives by de-valuing my experiences, dredging up a whole shit-ton of issues I don't even want to get into, except that it involves way too much of me being bitter about having internalized stupid things people said to me years ago.

ALSO IT WILL NOT STOP BEING COLD AND RAINY. FUCK WINTER.

(If it wasn't really obvious, today has not been a happy day. >:( I'm going to crawl into bed with Being Human episodes until I feel less like punching the universe in the crotch.)

 The thing I hate about November is that I have to start planning for Christmas. Not that I don't love Christmas, because it is my favorite time ever. I just wonder when it got so complicated. Well, okay, that's a lie. I know when it got complicated. I just wish it wasn't.

Planning out my holidays is a lot like negotiating an arms treaty - everyone has speak carefully and make a lot of concessions, and if you step wrong things are going to blow up. I have to figure out which days/evenings/events I'm going to do with which family members, and how I'm going to get from one place to another, and who I'm going to stay with when, and where they will be then, and somebody always feels slighted and/or put upon. And since nothing short of the threat of nuclear armageddon would induce my parents to speak to each other civilly (and even that's a bit of a toss-up), I have to do all the back-and-forth. Which is...tiring, to say the least. And Christmas is such an emotional, family oriented time to begin with that it makes it a lot worse than, say, deciding who I'm spending 4th of July with. 

A lot of times when I tell people my parents are divorced, they say something along the lines of "oh, I hope they still get along all right." And then I can't stop laughing. Saying my parents' divorce was messy is like saying that US-Russian relations were tense during the Cold War. Except my mom and dad are probably slightly more likely to kill each other if you locked them in a room together. 

You'd think before I decided to be an English major I would have considered how much I hate writing papers. Gaaaaaaah.

I had half my paper on child brides planned out before I realized I couldn't (intellectually, it's still a prompt) write about that, so now I'm writing about the link between visuality and sexuality in Rosetti's Jenny. And I am in that terrible place where I know everything I want to write about (the speaker's role as a voyeur which reduces Jenny to a passive sexual object, the observation of her physical observed beauty as a commodity, and her sexuality being problematic because it occurs in the public, visible sphere), but no idea how to tie it into a coherent thesis. FAIL.

Post Office: 2
masterofmidgets : 0

NO POWER CORD FOR ME TODAY. But I had a good cry at my mom about it, and now I am feeling much more philosophical about the whole thing. Whatever, I'm going to go to the CoHo and listen to Laura Gibson perform. And try to get some writing done maybe. In my NOTEBOOK. I feel so 19th century.

If I don't get it tomorrow though I am going to have to start kicking heads in, because that is NOT ON.

Dear Old People What I Call For My Job:

1) I recognize that the current economic climate is not happy-making and many people are struggling greatly. But if you are still employed and are a) a lawyer, b) a doctor, or c) an engineer, you are not as poor as you seem to think you are. We have a lot of students in dire financial straits who depend on financial aid to get them through the next four years (for example, me!) and we could really use your $30 that you're just going to spend on Starbucks anyway. Relatedly, whatever you think you know about our endowment, Stanford doesn't have as much money as you think we do. We certainly don't all put on our complimentary top hats and tails to eat cavier and tea cakes in the dining hall.

2) The university did not get rid of ROTC because they caved to "leftist scum," because they want to foster the liberal revolution, or because they hate America. They got rid of it because the ROTC's philosophy, particularly its anti-gay philosophy, is at odds with Stanford's attempts to be as inclusive and non-discriminating as possible. Furthermore, the university got rid of ROTC in the 1970s, at least 15 years before the majority of our current students were born. Your hissy fit is not going to change this, and punishing a bunch of students who had absolutely nothing to do with this decision because they did not even exist at the time is STUPID.

3) The university does not hate conservatives. It does not ignore conservative thought. It does not silence conservative students. It tilts heavily left, but that is because it is a UNIVERSITY and you know who tends to be liberal? INTELLECTUALS AND COLLEGE STUDENTS. Additionally, that Stanford replaced Western Civ as a freshman requirement with iHum is not a good example to use to illustrate your point. Acknowledging that the products of (white, straight, male) western civilization are not the be-all and end-all of intellectual accomplishment will not make the world stop on its axis, I promise (although it just might make our students of color/female students/queer students feel less alienated and ignored, god forbid).

4) SOCIALISM DOES NOT MEAN WHAT YOU THINK IT MEANS. SHUT THE FUCK UP.

This has been a public service announcement from your friendly neighborhood midget.

Things I know about the European witch-hunts that make it very hard for me to appreciate pop culture:

1. The Spanish Inquisition? Comparatively not all that bad. Yes, they did some horrifyingly evil things, but they had a lot of legal and bureaucratic rules in place limited what was permissible for their agents to do - especially after a lack of rules led to a wholesale execution of Basques in Northern Spain based on shoddy evidence - which cut down on the atrocities committed by investigators in other nations. Also, since their focus was heretics rather than specifically witches, they wanted to convert people back to the true faith, so they didn't kill nearly as many as you'd think. And they stopped witch-hunting decades first, and decades before anyone else.

2. The English also didn't have that many trials (although the Scottish were quite voracious) because of some differences in rules of evidence and cultural attitudes. The heart of the witch hunting craze was what is now Germany and surrounding regions, but at the time it was a bunch of disconnected little territories ruled by minor princes and noblemen under an overarching but not very influential empire - some of them were Catholic, some of them were Protestant, and while historians can identify a lot of risk factors why some communities would have witch hunts and some wouldn't, it's still kind of a crapshoot. The French had some fun too, but the eastern Europeans didn't really get into it.

3. Witches were burned at the stake. They were also hanged. And drowned. And they died being tortured. And they were excommunicated and banished. Depends on the country and the court they happened to be in.

4. The witch trials didn't happen in the Middle Ages. In fact, almost no witch trials happened in the Middle Ages, because there were several pieces of relevant theology (and several other pieces of populist scare-mongering) concerning who witches were, what they did, and how much of a threat they were, that weren't published until the 1400s. The witch hunts happened in Early Modern Europe. There were actually two waves of witch trials, one in the late 1400s and one in the late 1500s/early 1600s (that one was a lot worse). Salem is actually totally an outlier, since a) the patterns of colonial witch trials (influenced by colonial theology as well as Afro-Caribbean and Native American folklore) are kind of different from Continential trials, and also it's way later than most of the European trials. They were still doing it across the pond, but not with nearly as much enthusiasm.

5. Most accused witches were women. In most countries. In some it was even. In others, like Iceland (and I think some places in Eastern Europe) it was mostly men. It's not as simple as saying the witch hunts were caused by misogyny, although the threat to the patriarchy caused by the changing roles of women did certainly play a part. In fact, we're still not entirely sure what the root cause of the witch hunts was - a lot of theories have been floated, from hatred of women (especially women who challenged the social structure by being single or angry or smart), to guilt over failing to observe social rules, to a monetary desire to sieze property, to fears over the changing religious landscape, to bad weather patterns, to hallucinations caused by bad grain, to a misinterpretion by theologians and laypeople over pagan practices observed by the peasantry. The truth is...probably some combination of all of the above. It is complicated, y'all.

I hate being all OCD about this kind of thing, particularly since I know I've told people not to stress out about things like Merlin being about as anachronistic as a guy in a Storm Trooper costume at a Ren Faire. But it was a really fascinating (if unbelievably horrifying) cultural phenomenon and it bugs me to have to sit there and go 'not true. Really not true. OMG HOW DID YOU GET THIS SO WRONG' every time it comes up. 

LOOK AT ME I'M HYPOCRITICAL. Oh well. A girl has to have some glaring contradictions in her life.