Love In The Asylum

I had my last ever class as a Stanford student today. We spent 90 minutes talking about video game interfaces and the survival horror genre. Which somehow seems like a fitting cap to my undergraduate career. (I think it's a testimony to how sweet this professor is that even though he scheduled a class after the term had technically ended and classes should have been done, no one bothered to correct him and almost everyone showed up.)

Um. The opera was amazingly magnificent and I will post about it in more depth as soon as I have five minutes to myself, which at this rate may be after commencement. None of my finals are especially arduous, but I do have a short story due tomorrow (epic writing planned for tonight, oh man), and two projects due early next week. And I have to pack up four years worth of junk and clean everything before my grandma gets here, and I think there are probably some senior events I'm supposed to go to, and I want to get in one last shift at the call center to get some paperwork I need for my resume and say goodbye to everyone. So yeah, busy busy busy, not in an awful way, but I probably won't around a ton until I'm done with school.

In the meantime, here's some naked footballers. Just, you know. My way of saying I love you. And Jens Lehmann's fabulous ass.

Three Things (The Awkward Tuesday Edition)

1. Awkward: having one of my professors unexpectedly sit down in the seat next to me at an event while I was checking my flist on my laptop. (Luckily, this was Awesome Media Studies Prof, so instead of being weirded out she just asked me which fandoms I was in.) Extra Special Super Awkward: having on my professors unexpectedly come up from behind me while I'm standing outside the room talking to colourofsaying about whether the German NT recruits by dick size, and how we can get more evidence to corroborate this theory. Auuuuugh.

2. I got my eyes examined yesterday! It was a good excuse to get out of class, because as it turns out California in spring is INCREDIBLY BRIGHT OMG OW. It's been about eight years since I had an eye exam, and I forgot how weird getting your eyes dilated feels. Anyway, apparently my sight's gotten worse since the last time, so this weekend I am dragging Freshman Guy into town to help me pick out glasses. Oh boy. I am thinking chunky black hipster douchebag glasses, y/y?

3. Watching To The Ends of the Earth a couple of weeks ago reminded me how much I love Age of Sail stories, so I've started in on O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series and omggggg Jack and Stephen are in love. It reminds me of Sherlock Holmes in a way - even without reading any sexual desire into it, the foundation of the series is very obviously meant to be the intensely devoted emotional relationship between the two male leads. It really is quite lovely. Me being me, of course, I'm also keeping track of Gayest Moments Of Hot Naval Love, from Jack and Stephen's flirtatious meet cute at a dinner party to Jack killing several men in the face for kidnapping Stephen in Spain. I'm only a couple books in, but thus far, this scene takes the cake, for sheer inexplicableness if nothing else:

[context: during shore leave in Bombay, Stephen meets his and Jack's mutual ex Diana and he and Jack almost fight about it when he's late reporting back to the ship because he's with her. Jack tries to mend bridges by taking Stephen up into the rigging and flirting with him. Because yeah.]

"'Why,' said Stephen, 'I am obliged to you for the sight of it, sure.'
'But it does raise your heart, you know, whatever you may say,' said Jack. 'It raises it a hundred feet above the deck. Ha ha - I can get a good thing now and then, given time - oh ha ha ha! You never smoked it - you were not aware of my motions.'

When Jack was as amused as this, so intensely amused throughout his whole massive being, belly and all, with his scarlet face glorious and shining and his blue eyes darting mirth from their narrowed slits, it was impossible to resist. Stephen felt his mouth widen involuntarily, his diaphragm contract, and his breath beginning to come in short thick pants.

"But I am truly grateful to you, my dear," he said, "for having brought me to this proud perilous eminency, this quasi-apex, this apogee; you have indeed lifted my heart, in the spirit and the flesh, and I am now resolved to mount up daily."

Possibly even more entertaining than seeing representations of the internet on television from the mid-nineties: reading art/film theory about the internet from the mid-nineties. Fascinating stuff, but it is really weird to see a vision of the future projected forward from AOL and geocities, and the changes they talk about never happened, or happened in completely different ways. Web 2.0 and the social networking boom must have blown their minds. And I don't know if I'll ever quite be able to grasp what it was like, because this technology grew up with me and I've never entirely lived without it. I don't always like new developments (still not sold on Twitter, even if Jack_Wilshere and Cesc are adorable on it), but it all makes sense to me.

Apologies for muddled extemporizing, it's been that kind of weekend.

Last night I went to see Sweeney Todd - quite a good show, even if several of the actors mistook "faking a British accent" for "mumbling all their lines" and several others mistook "acting" for "shouting." But while I couldn't understand any of the lines in the slower songs, when the leads got to let loose and really chew the scenery they were delightful. "Epiphany" gave me shivers down my spine, it was so well-staged/lit and the actor was so intense. And then on the way home I got Freshman Guy to spill the details about an incident earlier in the week he had hinted about on facebook where he tried to hook up with a guy for anonymous bathroom sex in the history building, but instead ended up sitting on the floor of the bathroom stall hugging this semi-undressed guy and talking him through a sexual identity crisis. Just for the record, I am never touching anything in the history building again.

Today I was reminded why I don't read more literary fiction than I do. Out of the six stories we have to read for tomorrow's class, we had: a woman whose abusive husband murdered their three children, a woman trying to keep her nursing client's daughter from stealing his ashes after he dies of dementia, a man who is literally crucified while his pregnant teenage daughter watches, an old man reliving his divorce and his neighbor's death, and a man who is murdered and dismembered by his coworker so he can't turn him in for killing several other people. Isn't that cheerful and upbeat? Last week's book was all rape, stalking, and child abuse, but at least it had a tiger. I suspect my professors of being in a conspiracy with my uterus to make me overly introspective and melancholy. That seems like a good word for it, melancholy, because it's not an active sadness. Just the vague, misanthropic unhappiness that comes from reading a lot of sad stories at once, some of them uncomfortably personal.

At least Arsenal finally won a match today. And I will watch some cartoons and go to bed and tomorrow there will be entirely less moping, I swear.

So, my remixing class is starting off with a bunch of modern/post-modern art theory essays, and it's...well. See for yourself:

"What I have been calling the fiction of the originary status of the picture surface is what art criticism proudly names the opacity of the modernist picture plane, only in so terming it, the critiic does not think of this opacity as fictitious. Within the discursive space of modernist art, the putative opacity of the pictorial field must be maintained as a fundamental concept. For it is the bedrock on whic a whole structure of related terms can be built. All those terms - singularity, authenticity, uniqueness, originality, original - depend on the originary moment of which this surface is both the empirical and the semiological instance. If modernism's domain of pleasure is the space of auto-referentiality, this pleasure dome is erected on the semiological possibility of the pictorial sign as nonrepresentational and nontransparent, so that the signified becomes the redundant condition of a reified signifier. But from our perspective, the one from which we see that the signifier cannot be reified; that its objecthood, its quiddity, is only a fiction; that every signifier is itself the transparent signified of an already-given decision to carve it out as the vehicle of a sign - from this perspective there is no opacity, but only a transparency that opens onto a dizzying fall into a bottomless system of reduplication." [Rosalind Krauss, "The Originality of the Avant Garde"]

I've read this paragraph four times, and I still can't parse what the hell she is on about, except that it has something to do with Duchamp and photographic reproduction. You win, art theory. I thought literary criticism was bad (Sturgeon's Corollary of Academic Discourse - 10% of it is engaging/interesting/relevant, the other 90% is nonsense and intellectual masturbation), but we've got nothing on this. This is critical technobabble raised to its highest art form. Somewhere, George Orwell's ghost is crying.

On the other hand, this essay by Jonathan Latham on intellectual property presents an interesting ethical model for artists in the internet era. Nothing fandom hasn't argued vociferously before, but well-stated, and something I'd like to see more professionals advocating.

Three Things (The Rare Happy Monday Edition):

1. I may or may not be writing a story about Jack Wilshere and Aaron Ramsey making a blanket fort in a hotel room in Cardiff after the England-Wales Euro match. Don't look at me like that, it's all colourofsaying's fault. I'm just in it for the adorable make-outs and the jokes about Wayne Rooney being a dick.

2. This is the first time in a while I've had to shop a bunch of different classes - I'm finished with all my gen ed requirements and all my major requirements, so I'm really only limited by how early I want to get up and how much work I want to do. The classes I went to today were pretty awesome though! I'm almost positive I'm going to stick with the film studies class on remix culture, which looks fabulously fun and weird and hands-on. We're doing an entire unit on fan vidding, how awesome is that? Also a definite keeper is my salon writing class - the three hours tonight went by a lot faster than I was expecting. And the idea of actually getting to meet/talk to most of the writers on our syllabus is pretty neat. Also one of the guys in the class is a Barca fan. ;D

3. It is spring, and Doctor Who is in the air! colourofsaying and I are getting ourselves geared up for Neil Gaiman's (!!) episode, which explains the following conversation. Sort of.

[context: comments in this post about Neil's episode, in which colourofsaying suggests that it needs a Giant Green Slime Rat and a Giant Slithery Winged Dragon-Snake Thing With Trailing Tentacles and someone else asks which one the Doctor will end up marrying]

masterofmidgets: the Doctor would like you to know that their love is beautiful and pure, thank you very much
colourofsaying: Seconded. They're meant to be together! Across time, across species, across numbers of limbs! The TARDIS built them a special dark, dank honeymoon suite so the dragon-snake-thing would feel at home - it was her wedding gift to them. Amy and Rory made tearful and amusing toasts at the wedding. And somewhere, the Master started glowering for no discernible reason.
masterofmidgets: eventually they break up because she keeps leaving sucker-marks on the TARDIS control panels
masterofmidgets: alas, for tempestuous summer romances
colourofsaying: The Doctor should know better than to stop by Newx20 Earth's version of Vegas
colourofsaying: It never ends well.
masterofmidgets: but they have those wonderful little sticky pink cocktails

You guys, I cannot adequately explain how much I love medieval literature. It is like a big ball of crazy and barely euphemistic porn wrapped in bizarre French verbs and obscure Christian symbolism. IT IS THE GREATEST THING EVER. Here are some examples of what we are doing this week in class, succinctly summarized for your reading pleasure:

Historica Calamitatum (Peter Abelard)- French scholar gets into endless academic flamewars with everyone he meets until he gets castrated, after which he becomes a monk but does not, actually, stop stirring up shit, because that would require him to stop bitching for five minutes. Also he has some kind of epic genre-defining love affair with some girl named Heloise, but he spends a lot less time talking about her than about all those jerks who can't admit how awesome he is. But then she did name his son Astralabe, so maybe that's fair.

Guigemar (Marie de France) - Asexuality can be cured by getting shot in the leg with your arrow when trying to kill a magic deer, and it is totally okay to sleep with another guy's wife as long as he is ugly and you are not. Also, having everyone in the kingdom line up to try to untie the fair maiden's chastity belt is not creepy and gross in any way. I don't think Medieval people understood how knots worked very well.

Bisclavret (Marie de France) - Long before Stephanie Meyers, Marie De France was over in England writing about totally hot werewolves who just need a girlfriend who understands them. This werewolf's girlfriend, however, while she doesn't seem to mind the part where he's a wolf is a little too freaked out by the part where he's naked while he's a wolf, so she dumps him for somebody else. After which he bites off her nose and goes to make out with the king instead. All of this actually happens in the story.

After this we move on to Floris and Blancheflour, the romantic tale of a twelve-year-old harem girl and the boy who loves her enough to let everyone else in the story figure out how he should rescue her. I LOVE THIS SO MUCH.

I got workshopped today in my Creative Non-Fiction class! Doing a workshop in non-fiction seems a lot different to me than a fiction or poetry workshop - the basics are still the same, it's still mostly about craft and technique and themes, mechanical stuff, but because I'm writing about myself, it's a lot scarier. I have to sit there with my mouth shut while the rest of the class speculates about my motives and my personality and facts about my life. Which is weird, especially since, even though the story was mostly about the World Cup, I also talked about some really personal stuff, like my dad's drug addiction and coming out to my mom this summer. Lots of potential for things to get awkward! But no, it went really well. I got some nice ego-stroking compliments about my writing style, and some good criticism on the weak parts that will help with my revisions a lot. I'm getting kind of excited to start working on this story again now.

There was going to be something here about what else is going on right now, but all that is going on right now is research. I have two research projects do right after I get back from Thanksgiving break, so I am in obsessive reading mode and not likely to come out any time soon. And of course with that comes procrastination. So here's a few TV shows I'm watching right now!

Red Dwarf: I DON'T EVEN KNOW OKAY. One of the novelizations was playing on BBC7 this weekend and I thought it was funny enough that I wanted to check out the show, and now I cannot stop watching. Only up to season 2 so far, but OMG why do I love Rimmer so much? He's an objectively awful person and I would probably loathe him in real life, but oh, he's just so self-hating and lonely and pathetic, I want to give him a hug. I am so predictable. I also really love The Cat, for reasons not entirely clear to me.

Sunao ni Narenakute: a group of 5 twenty-to-thirty somethings become best friends on Twitter and decide to meet up in real life. Drama and romantic entanglements ensue! I started watching this show because I thought the premise was cute and the romantic leads (a young probationary high school teacher who keeps failing her exams and a would-be pro photographer with crazy hair) were reasonably charming, and then I kept watching in the middle after it kind of jumped the shark because I wanted to see where it was going, and then the last couple of episodes killed off the one character I really loved in a completely stupid way and now I'm just annoyed with it. I'm offering it as a Yuletide fandom, though, because I'm hoping to get to write a fix-it for the stupid.

Tumbling: OMG THIS SHOW IS AMAZING AND I LOVE IT. I feel like I have to explain the premise, because it is too absurd not to: Azuma Wataru is a yanki punk who smokes on school grounds, dyes his hair red, and solves all his problems by punching a lot of people. He doesn't do well with authority or not punching people, so when he's told that, in order to graduate, he needs to join a group activity, all does not go smoothly, and he gets kicked off (or storms off from) every club he tries to join. But then, during a school assembly, he sees the boys' rhythmic gymnastics team perform, and immediately falls in love with tumbling. He storms onto the gym floor and demands that the team captain let him on the team and teach him how to do it too. And thus begins the sports drama. Things that this show does not have: sense, logic, competent gangsters. Things that it does have: bouffant hairdos, a canon gay character, gymnastics, the Power of Friendship, punching, sparkly leotards, boys crying and hugging, enough hoyay to sink a ship. CHAIN-SMOKING, FIST-FIGHTING HIGH SCHOOL THUGS IN SPARKLY PINK LEOTARDS. WHY ARE YOU NOT WATCHING THIS RIGHT NOW?

I just bought my plane tickets home for winter break, and now I'm feeling desperately broke. Which, looked at objectively, is kind of weird, because, well, I have money. Not enough to go swimming in, certainly, but I've never really touched the money I saved up from my summer job two years ago, and I've been slowly but steadily adding to my balance since. Aside from big, once a term things like Yaoi-Con and plane tickets and that unfortunate time my laptop died on me, I don't make a habit of spending more than I earn at work. I'm in no immediate danger of clearing out my savings and having to scape up loose change for the groceries. But I set these arbitrary limits in my head, these lines for where my bank balance should be, and every time I earn more money I draw the line higher, and when I get too close to it, I start panicking. I tell myself I don't have the money to spend on things, and it feels true, even when it realistically isn't, and if I ignore it I spend the next week justifying it to myself and feeling guilty.

Growing up with my mother as the ultimate anti-example of money sense has made me a lot more careful about how, when, and what I spend my money on, and I don't doubt that that's a good and practical skill to have, but I wish it came with a little less baggage. Ah, well.

School continues apace. I'm getting ready to start two big final research projects, one on something to do with spy fiction/thrillers (we haven't read those yet so I don't know what issues will stand out to me...), and one on the changing role of the tabla in Indian music. But there's not a lot of work I can do on them right at the moment, so this weekend I'm just focusing on getting my reading done. It's nice to finally have a few minutes worth of down time - with the Con last weekend and midterms before that I feel like I haven't slept in a month. I love my classes, I really do, but I can't wait until I don't have to take twenty units any more. Way too much work!

Tomorrow is a cleaning and baking day. The Book Sprawl is starting to take over my room again - I can't even see the surface of my desk, and the less said about my laundry the better. The bathroom's getting quite dire too. I already did the kitchen tonight. I even scrubbed the burner plates and mopped the floor! It's hard for me to get my head wrapped around the idea that I am voluntarily and willfully cleaning things, but it is nice to not have to worry about not having shoes on while I'm cooking. And once the bathroom is all clean and nice again, there will be Fucking Pie. It is like regular pie, but more awesome! Pie and homemade biscuits and Korean dramas, what more could a girl ask for?

I am still alive! More or less. This week and the next week are my big awful midterm crunch weeks: I had a presentation this week, and a paper due Monday, a long creative essay due Tuesday, and another paper due Thursday. I AM NEVER GOING TO SLEEP AGAIN.

But all hope is not lost! Aside from the soul-crushing amount of work I've got going on, this was actually a pretty good week. I was really worried about my presentation (which was on the role of the police in detective fiction, using Peter Wimsey and Philip Marlowe as examples) because I didn't think I was prepared enough for the actual talking part, but it went fine, and the professor complimented me on my thesis. The first paper I have due next week is a write-up of that presentation, and my notes are pretty thorough, so I should be able to bang it out easily enough.

I am slowly getting my tiny, triangular room to the point that it looks like an actual person lives in it, and not just a mobile library. Current step: posters! It's kind of a slow process, since I'm buying posters on Amazon with the money I get paid for participating in psych experiments, but yesterday I got my first new poster put up. It was nice to wake up this morning and see Cesc Fabregas being gorgeous on the wall beside my bed. And soon I will have an Amy Pond poster for the other wall.

Since the performative aspect is such a big part of the music class I'm taking right now, it shouldn't really be shocking that we're expected/encouraged to go to concerts. Which is pretty neat, even if it does play hell with my work schedule. On Wednesday night I went to see Shubha Mudgal (a Hindustani classical, khayal, and occasionally pop singer of great awesomeness) perform on campus, and then yesterday she and her accompanists did a Q&A for our class and did a few more songs. They were all really interesting, and really incredible musicians, I don't know how to talk about it at all. I really, really love the tabla. This upcoming Wednesday, we're taking a class trip into San Francisco to see Ravi Shankar perform. I considered not going, because it will make it hard as hell to get all my work done for Thursday, but DUDE. RAVI FUCKING SHANKAR.

I am right now in the process of dyeing my hair purple. Yay purple! I kind of wish I could have done it for Spirit Day, but I just couldn't get to store to buy dye until yesterday. But at least I've be properly interesting looking for Yaoi-Con! Tomorrow my aunt is coming up from Sacramento and we're going to, I don't know, do lunch or something. And then it is into the trenches for the foreseeable future of writing, writing, more writing, and some reading. And then writing! Ah, the glamourous life of an English major.

Things Wot I Have Done Today:

• sat through the MOST AWKWARD discussion section ever for poetry. I felt so bad for my TA - he was trying really hard, and we were just not clicking. Hopefully next week will go a little better. I shall certainly make an effort to be more articulate the next time around.


• gone to the library and gotten some books to add to Project Wodehouse. This may be foolish of me, given my current workload. I do not care.


• gone to the post office! My grandma sent me a package full of dried herbs. I now have nutmeg! And paprika, most wonderful of all spices. And rooooooosemaaaary.


• gone grocery shopping. I stayed within my food budget for the third week in a row! And that includes several things I didn't strictly need to buy but got anyway, like cornmeal and conditioner and oyster sauce. Most everything else was produce, go me. As a reward to myself, I'm going to Trader Joe's this week and buying myself a couple treats.


• made pasta and garlic shrimp for dinner. That turned out well - the garlic shrimp were delicious on their own, and I used enough olive oil that it made a great sauce for the pasta, too. I am also learning that there is no dish, ever, that cannot be improved by the addition of chili garlic paste. It is my favorite condiment EVER.


• Dusted the oven. DON'T EVEN ASK. IT WAS SO DISGUSTING. I just - honestly, that had never even occurred to me as a thing that would need to be done? WTF OVEN.

Things Left to Do

• Read Cold Comfort Farm (definitely need to be most of the way through this tonight, so I can get started on Rebecca. AUGH READING.)


• Read The Adderall Diaries. I guess you could call this supplemental reading - it isn't strictly on the syllabus, but our prof is making us read it because the author is coming in to talk to us on Thursday. Whatever, it's pretty interesting. But MORE READING.


• Watch the Doctor Who DVDs I got at the library today. I got one episode of Four (the one written by Douglas Adams), and all of Ten's first season, which somehow I have never seen. I smell a marathon! Gonna have to be, because I've got to give them back tomorrow.


• Smashing some orcs in DDO. I am back to playing my Paladin character, which is pretty fun - I'm certainly making more progress than I did before with a cleric or a bard. And his backstory is getting increasingly elaborate, I'm starting to really like him.