Love In The Asylum

Four days, five hours of sleep, and 9000 words, and my undergraduate academic life comes to an end. Amazing. Kind of impossible to get my head wrapped around.

I'm really proud of myself that the last paper I wrote at Stanford included this:

"This self-referential excessiveness characterizes the later episodes of the series and the related fan works. Some of the visual humor in Literal Pants, and the original parody it is based on, draws from canon events from the original show, but just as much is self-referential, based on mocking the fanon characterization of Marik, shout-outs to other creators, and call backs to jokes and events from the Abridged Series, including the premise of Marik stealing Yugi’s pants, which parodies several unsuccessful evil plots from the Evil Council video series."

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to sleep forever.

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.

Another round of finals successfully punched in the face, yay! I was hoping for the grade in my music class to be a little higher, but a B+ is pretty okay, and I did play a bit fast and loose with some of the assignment deadlines, so it's probably the grade I deserve. And on the bright side, I got an A in Poetry and Poetics! Let me say that again: I GOT AN A IN POETRY AND POETICS. I cannot even begin to explain what a relief this is for me. I'll finally be able to talk to Professor Boland without feeling like a cringing mass of guilt and failure now. Go me!

Also, my Genre Fiction professor thinks I'm awesome. This is from his (page and a half long, he is VERY THOROUGH) feedback on my final research paper/final grade:

"Your participation in seminar was excellent: yours were regularly the most insightful and original comments in the class session. I especially valued your ability to synthesize big claims, and your skeptical probings underneath the surfaces of our texts. Your occasional TVTropes-style analysis was also quite helpful in contributing a more formalist analysis of the way plots and characters are constructed out of conventions. I hope you will continue your reĔections on the meanings and agendas underneath all these đctions we consume for fun—and I wish you all the best for the new year and beyond."

MY TVTROPES STYLE ANALYSIS GUYS. I guess all the hours of my life that site has sucked up were worth something after all. (And as a side note, I do make a point of reading the tvtropes page for whatever book we're reading in class after I finish it, because it's usually a) a good way to start structuring thematic arguments, b) a good way to pick up plot details I was too dense to notice on my own and c) really fun.)

I guess I must have really overdone it during the last two weeks of school, because I'm just starting to feel like a normal human being again; this is probably the first day since I got back that I haven't been ready to go to bed by 6pm. And even though my family's trying to give me a break, it still feels like there's a lot going on already - visiting my grandpa at the rehab center (he's doing well, and looking better than I expected, but still pretty frail), lunch out with my mom and various relations, visiting with my grandma, an aborted attempt at going to a hockey game with my dad and the girlfriend. Tomorrow my aunt and I are going to get a Christmas tree. And I'm still in the middle of making arrangements for a couple of other meet-ups of greater or lesser importance. So much for relaxing, huh?

I'm still on the Great Adolescent Nostalgia Kick, but I've now moved on temporarily from Naruto to Yu Yu Hakusho. I think I'm regressing. I'd forgotten how utterly ridiculous this show is in every possible way. Junior high thugs with greaser hair? Check. Tournament arcs that go on for episodes at a time without anyone finishing a fight? Check. Characters who shout each other's names dramatically several dozen times in every scene? Check. The Power of Friendship and Love being enough to overcome all odds and physical limitations? SO MUCH CHECK.

And yet I love it, like, really a lot. I guess I'm just a sucker for a good shonen series.

I'd try to tell you that I didn't stay up all night reading Naruto fanfiction when I should have been working on my spy novel paper, but I think we all know that would be a lie.

I don't know where this sudden nostalgia kick is coming from (I've also been watching old episodes of Inuyasha in bits and pieces), but man, there is nothing like reading a ridiculous slashy Naruto/Harry Potter crossover to make me feel sixteen again. Oh younger self, why didn't you have any taste?

I am thinking now of trying to get caught up on Shippuden when, you know, I'm not drowning in massive amounts of finals work. It's been, god, about three years since I watched an episode, and apparently a lot's happened! And I can always use more eternal rivalry fueled hatesex and doomed romance in my life. And Genma!

Seriously, though, finals are going to kill me before I get that far.

Happy Hanukkah!

I hope all my friends of the Jewish persuasion are having an awesome holiday, and continue to enjoy the next seven days of candles and/or presents. There's just something wonderfully evocative about mid-winter festivals of light - even if it's not my holiday, I still think it's a pretty nifty idea.

Due to poor planning and time management on my part, I am going to spend the rest of tonight throwing together a presentation and write-up for my project on Indian tabla performance. It's a pretty neat concept - I'm going to use a bunch of music/video clips and an interview, and talk about how drumming and performance techniques get used in different ways in different contexts - but gaaaah, so much work. I don't think I'll be able to sleep again until Friday.

\o/

This makes it officially an entire year I've gone without fucking up - I had a B in Stats fall quarter, but other than that I've had nothing but As all year. Considering that I started the year out on academic probation, I'm pretty damn proud of the progress I've made in getting my act together. :D

Today has just generally been an awesome day! I DVRed the New Zealand/Slovakia match and watched it over breakfast, and then hanjuuluver picked me up so we could go out to lunch and hang out. Because we are basically giant dorks (and because hanjuuluver had an admission coupon) we went to the Natural History Museum and did SCIENCE! for the afternoon. It was awesome! The Planetarium part is kind of small and dinky and some of the electronics were outdated/needed repairing, but the actual archeological collection is pretty damn impressive. It's really crazy to stand there looking at something with legs five times taller than you and a tail that stretches across the entire room.

And then, to make sure we got all traces of maturity off of us, we went across the street to the park and rolled down hills until we were covered in grass and couldn't walk straight.

(Tonight: arguing politics with my dad's (conservative) girlfriend, computer games, and hopefully getting caught up on the last two weeks' worth of Doctor Who. I'm stunningly ambitious, aren't I?)

Brief check-in before I get back to the mind-numbing amount of work I still have to do tonight:

1. Already got my final grade posted for my Shakespeare class, aka the class where we only had one paper the entire quarter and I turned it in two and a half days late, and I got an A-. FUCK YEAH I'M AWESOME. Also, now I am done with Shakespeare forever.

2. I only turned my AmLit paper in five hours late, which I guess is an improvement over two days (and the professor is relatively flexible and knows me well since it's a tiny tiny class, so I don't foresee a major problem). That was really quite fun, actually, since we could do a creative response instead of a full paper - I chose to take a feminist utopia novel about a society of women who reproduce asexually and have never seen men and queered it the hell up. I'll try to post it tomorrow, it's fun stuff.

3. Going to take a nap and get started on my Short Story Take-Home exam, which is due at lunch-time tomorrow. And if I manage to finish it successfully I will a) be DONE WITH FINALS and b) have gone a whole, entire year without fucking up. Amazing, innit?

Ways in Which My Academic Life and My Fandom Life Resemble Each Other (the short version):

1. Both contribute to my chronic state of sleep debt, as I don't believe in ever doing anything at a reasonable hour that could be put off to 3am.

2. Both tend to involve me going off on long, pedantic, hand-flappingly enthusiastic tangents about random subjects, whether I'm talking about the tragic backstory of a character on Doctor Who or the construction of concepts of trust and virtue in Middle English romances.

3. One way or another, at some point I always end up talking about fictional characters and how they are gay for each other. *grins sheepishly*

I had ambitious plans for the work I was going to get done over the three-day weekend, I really did! But in the end, pretty much the only thing I actually did was decide that I was never going to be able to come up with a decent thesis for a paper about race in Titus Andronicus, so screw it. I'm just going to write a 12 page paper on the Antonio/Bassanio/Portia love triangle instead. I'm pretty sure I can come up with some clever points about a) how the relationship functions differently depending on whose POV we are approaching it from and b) how it reflects the issues of acquisition, trade and fairness going on in the play, and it will at least be more entertaining to write.

I still maintain that this, like most of Shakespeare's love triangles, would best be solved by a proper Elizabethan threesome, but nobody bothered to ask me.

Things that I have not done in the month good god since I posted last:

Saved the multiverse from the dread might of Darkseid using only my wits and the power of Freddie Mercury

Founded an order of suburban ninjas pledged to avenge themselves on anyone who breaks the noise restrictions in the dormitories

Won a Pulitzer Prize for my scathing yet poetic post-structuralist novel on the lives of itinerant canoe-ers

Things that I have been doing:

Watching the first three seasons of Highlander in the span of a week and a half in a fit of adolescent nostalgia. And subsequently realizing that while my appreciation of Adrian Paul's aesthetics is undamaged by time, I now have a much deeper dramatic and flaily love for Richie and his adorable puppy-ness.

Alternating between spending obsessive amounts of time playing D&D Online and spending obsessive amounts of time playing Dragon Fable.

Having very angry feelings toward DC about events in a certain comic that shall not be named because just thinking about makes me shake with indignantly disgusted bitterness all over again

Making slow but steady progress on my Help_Haiti story on the rare occasions I surface long enough from under a sea of classwork to do creative writing (now ~2000 words and Chekov is about to throw a bitch-fit and start stripping).

Writing a truly ludicrous number of papers on the use of social media technology in contemporary/near-contemporary cyberpunk fiction, Gawain and the Green Knight as a morality play on keeping your word as a chivalric virtue, veiling by women in Bedouin tribes, and Torchwood.

Honestly, this quarter has been...well, really good in that I adore all my classes passionately and I'm reasonably sure I'm going to pass everything (my big hurdle is always that point where I get all AAAAAHCAN'TCOPE and just don't turn any of my final papers in at all, but I turned my last paper in today so no matter how I do on the actual exams I made it through that), but's it's just like things got incredibly hectic around midterms and then never let up at all. Tons of reading, lots of non-paper assignments amidst the big couple of papers, and very little free time for me to do anything that required my brain to be on. So I am sorry for dropping off the face of the planet, my dear flist!

Next week I have every single final exam on the same day. Two in-class written finals, one take-home final, and a writing portfolio, all scheduled for Wednesday, which is going to suck brass monkey balls. But then I will be done and then I will be home and then I will have a whole week and a half to sleep and read and get caught up on writing and the other non-urgent stuff I've been ignoring. I am very much looking forward to it. Especially the part where I will be asleep.

What I Should Be Doing:

Working on my short story revision (due Wednesday)

Working on my paper revision (due Thursday)

Studying for my Stats 60 final (tomorrow)

Working on my Yuletide fic

What I Have Been Doing:

playing Sims

watching NCIS season 6

watching Modern Family

getting over-involved in fat wank and pro-choice wank on LHC

letting colourofsaying flail at me about figure skating

rediscovering that Daniel Jackson is one of the hottest men in the history of ever


I seriously need a priority readjustment.