nor so wide as a church door

Two exams in the last week; neither of them were all that taxing, but I was pretty sure they wouldn't be. Not that I didn't study for them anyway, of course, even if it was kind of tedious. Especially the stuff for Bio, my god. :P I learned about ionic and covalent bonds in, like, middle school.

The past two classes of Cross-Cultural Communication, we've been watching Where the Spirit Lives, which was very satisfying in some ways and a little disappointing in others. (Today's title lyric comes from the end credits song, I'm Going Home, by the lovely Buffy Sainte-Marie.) Initially, I thought the movie was going to be entirely from the point of view of Ashtohkomi. ( I was half right. ) Anyway. It was good, and Michelle St. John was brilliant, and I'm glad I watched it; but I think there were some ways that it could have been better.

B is, as always, annoying me. ( No new complaints; just the sex-positivity thing again. ) So that was a fun talk.

At least The Daily Show's been good lately. That Moment of Zen with the lady talking about sex ed, and sounding so aghast about the idea of people explaining to kids that masturbation feels good? ... I lol'd.

Christmas was lovely, and I hope everybody had a lovely Friday, no matter what they were celebrating or not celebrating. I got books! And movies! And more books! :D I haven't actually read any of the books I was given yet; I've been too busy reading the ones I gave to other people.

The one I feel like blabbing about specifically is ( Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. Technically, spoilers within. ) It was reasonably fun to read, and there were portions that I genuinely loved, but the changes to the book's universe could have been handled much better than they were, IMO. As I was reading, I kept catching myself thinking that any one of a handful of fandom people could have done a much more awesome job with it.

As for movies, well. My family and I went to go see Avatar. I had queasy and hesitant feelings about this movie the first time I heard what it was about, and actually seeing the movie ... ( did not really alleviate those feelings. Definite spoilers, in here. ) The bottom line is that it was a very pretty movie, and that's just about the only positive thing I can say. Neytiri, Grace, and Trudy were all wonderful characters who did not get to do nearly as much as I wanted them to; and the whole thing was filled with undercurrents of racism, sexism, and ableism that really drove me crazy. Thinking about it now, it reminds me a little of 300 - if I could turn off the analytic part of my brain that is concerned with unfunny business, the part that fandom turned on and that I am extremely grateful for, it was decent enough, if still painfully unoriginal. But I can't turn that part off, and I don't really want to.

Sherlock Holmes, I liked infinitely better. My family was planning to see it Christmas Day, but those plans fell through because my sister got sick and didn't feel much like going out. So I saw it with my friends a few days later, and hopefully will be seeing it again with my family. And, my god, ( the slash. Spoilers here, too, natch. ) I reeeeeeeally hope at least a few people do some fic in this 'verse; it may not have been the best movie in the entire world, but it was reasonably solid and fun and struck me as a welcoming sort of source when it comes to fic. (Not that book canon or other adaptations haven't been - although I am pleased by a young and clever and competent Watson, some Holmes sources kind of shortchange him. Didn't hurt that he was Jude Law, either. :D)

The most significant event aside from that stuff would be that I somehow managed to blow through the rest of the terrifying HP AU, and now it's ... done. Book 1 of it, at least. Of course, I need to edit it before I can even consider putting it up anywhere; but being finished with the first draft is still a pretty awesome milestone. I'm not sure it's even really sunk in yet. Thank goodness there's a Burn Notice marathon right now, or I don't know what I would do with myself. ^^

Yesterday was quite a day. I left in the morning for Audiology, having lingered just long enough to watch B wake up and discover that it was snowing outside (she loves it when it snows), and when I came back, the door to our room was open and the recycling bin was out in the hall. Hmm, says I to myself, this is unusual, and so I was in some sense braced for it when I came level with our doorway and discovered that the floor was covered in water, and B was hoping desperately that I was the clean-up crew.

( The Saga of the Drains, complete with happy ending! )

Today has been much less interesting so far. Turned in my film journal and took the final quiz in Human Cultures, which means that class is officially over as far as I'm concerned, since there's no final exam. The World Lit final is tomorrow at 11:30, and then I don't have another exam until Cog-Neuro on Monday afternoon. w00t.

I have to admit, I kind of like exam week. Yes, there's studying, but if you pace it right, you end up with so much free time. And it doesn't hurt that my mom sent me a package full of candy to help me through - also doesn't hurt that B is leaving sometime next Tuesday, while I am not leaving until next Friday. ^^

Which reminds me. ( Yet more things B has done lately that annoy me. ) She put her scarf on again this morning, and asked me whether she looked more Soviet or more Muslim; I told her that all she looked like to me was a person with a scarf over their hair, just like anybody else would if they had a scarf over their hair, but I don't think she got the point. If only I were more articulate.

Anyway, I should stop griping and start studying for World Lit. \o/

Looks like it's storydump time once again; my classes have picked up ever so slightly, possibly because the professors can all sense Thanksgiving inching closer, and combined with all the proofing of other people's papers I've somehow ended up doing (AT asks me to check over her Spanish papers! I don't even know Spanish!), some of my copious free time has started slipping out of my grasp.

Which is ironic, considering that I was bored in September, and now NaNo is coming up. Oh, life.

Anyway. In the category of Offensive Things B Has Said/Done, there are a couple new gems, including ( rape is funny! This movie might have a rape scene in it, but it's a comedy! ) Needless to say, I was not at all amused.

B laughed.

As has recently become my SOP, I let her know what I thought, although not with the kind of language or at the kind of volume I might have liked. Br came down very firmly on my side later, which was a relief, but B still insists the movie was funny, which kind of makes me want to cry.

The other one was the somewhat less distressing ( he sounds gay! ) I did not know it was possible to be "too PC" for Vermont, of all states.

The interesting thing is that I wasn't being PC. Perhaps this is just me, but that term tends to connote more calculation than anything else, when I hear it - you are being PC if you are careful or are telling other people to be careful what you/they say because you are worried that a member of some kind of minority will one day overhear and be offended by it. And I'm pretty sure that used to be what I was doing, at least in some cases. But somewhere in the last few years, I've managed to grow a brain, and now it's more about stopping things because they are actively offending me, not because they have the potential to offend somebody else. I mean, I still want to make sure that I speak up when I see something that might bother somebody who isn't me, because it's better than nothing even if it speaks to an enormous lack of empathy on my part, but most of the time, now, I am offended. That attitude toward rape bothers me immensely; and, yes, partly it bothers me kind of on behalf of anyone who has ever been sexually assaulted, but mostly it just bothers me, even though I am not a member of that group (... yet, I suppose I should say, considering the odds). That attitude toward gay men, likewise, bothers me, even though the odds are very long that I will ever be a gay man, and I am terribly lacking in gay male friends.

... And now I need to stop talking about this, because I'm getting progressively less able to communicate my point, and also if I don't stop I am going to be hugely grouchy and sharp with B when she comes back.

On the more amusing end of the spectrum of stupid I've encountered recently, there was a boy in my World Literature class who ended up taking control of the class discussion, and moved it kind of abruptly away from the Aeneid and toward the value of war. ... In a sense where he said, "I'm okay with America becoming a violent empire that takes over the world if it means I'm going to be wealthy and happy," almost verbatim. He quoted Sean Hannity on the matter of America being the greatest nation God ever put on the earth, unironically. He actually told the class that it was a good thing the French, the English, and the Germans had been such good "warriors" (yes, that is the word he used), because otherwise America wouldn't be here - they wouldn't have been able to clear out all those Amerindians who were in their way, after all.

It pretty much went like this:

CRAZY BOY: **talks a boatload of ridiculousness**
REST OF THE CLASS: ... there is not enough D: in the WORLD.
ONE AWESOME KID IN THE CORNER WHOM I NOW ♥: Well, he did quote Sean Hannity. I mean, what were we expecting, after that?

Basically, the AKitC (Awesome Kid in the Corner) saved the whole incident from being something that it would make me sad inside to remember, and turned it into a reasonably amusing anecdote to tell people. ♥, AKitC. ♥.

I'm still going to mass on Sunday afternoons - I really, really enjoy the singing, although I'm still a little nervous that somebody's going to get weird about me being in the choir, and it's interesting to listen to the sermons. Sometimes I almost feel like the sermon ruins the day's reading, because the passages from the Bible are so eloquent they pretty much speak for themselves. And there is always the occasional awkward moment - last Sunday, for example, the reading was from the end of Mark 10, the passage about the blind man named Bartimaeus asking to be healed. The ... priest? I am still not sure about my terminology - went a little overboard in imagining the awfulness of being blind; I was with him on it being something of a shame to never see the faces of your parents, but the look of love in somebody's eyes strikes me as kind of take-it-or-leave-it (wouldn't the sound of love in somebody's voice, or the feel of love in somebody's touch, be pretty amazing?), and he totally lost me on the blind missing out on the "fullness of being a human person" [sic]. I was expecting him to go on to something like never seeing the colors of a sunset, not, you know, somehow not being a complete person. o.O

Also, I still have trouble not laughing when the bells ring during the transubstantiation (and why do I know that word and not what the guy who talks is called?); I know this is awful of me, but it seriously does sound like the background sound effect for a moment of truly terrible SFX from an old episode of The Twilight Zone, or something.

The HP AU is ever so slowly inching its way toward completion. I'm trying to get a decent chunk of it done before NaNo starts, but it is dawning on some part of my subconscious that when I finish it - well, when I finish it I'm going to edit it, natch, until it is less awful, but at some point after that, I'm going to ... post it. Probably on the Pit, first, although I'd like to have it here, too, just for the sake of having all my fannishness in one place (with tags!). Other people (besides M and my sister) will be able to see it. /o\ I ... I don't know about this whole "writing" thing.

And, of course, it doesn't help that NaNo is starting to take over my brain. The odds are on a sequel to last year: this time, instead of thwarting the massive evil plot of a clockwork company in AU!Britain, my dwarf airship pirate captain and her trusty crew will most likely be fighting demons in AU!India. And possibly borrowing a goddess's hammer to do a little smashing; we'll see.

Aaaaaaaand now that I'm done with this giant wall of text, I should go get dinner. \o/

It was B's 21st birthday yesterday, so, naturally, she went out and got drunk.

I don't drink, for a number of different reasons: the biggest one is that I just plain hate the taste of alcohol, but I also actually find the entire idea of drunkenness a little creepy, like, you are deliberately putting yourself into a state where you no longer make the same decisions you would normally make - you are, at least to some extent, a different person. It weirds me out, idk. Plus it doesn't really seem like it's worth it: B tends to characterize it to me as something to do for fun, but A) I have always managed to have fun enough to make me happy without alcohol (M, K, Ka, J, and Q also do not drink, generally speaking), B) it seems to only actually be fun as long as you're drunk, given the number of times B has bemoaned all the drunk-dials she made/stupid things she did, and C) the amount of pain and vomit that follows seems like quite a bit more unpleasantness than any power of alcohol to enhance fun can outweigh.

(NB: All of this applies much more to binge drinking, college-party-type drinking, than going out with friends for a few drinks on a Friday or having a cold beer on a hot afternoon. I'm not, like, morally opposed to the consumption of alcohol in general, or anything like that.)

Anyway, the point is: I feel like a terrible person, but I'm kind of evilly enjoying watching her suffer through her hangover. (I know, worst friend ever. /o\)

I also kind of enjoyed that she was gone last night, because it meant I had control of the TV; I watched a couple episodes of SVU, and then an episode of HawthoRNe that I think I must have missed the first time around. I've come to really love HawthoRNe: I love the predominance of relationships between women, and between characters of color (and, pleasingly often, both at once!); I think I may be developing a girlcrush on Jada Pinkett Smith - and Suleka Mathew, for that matter; and I'm pleased deep in my nerdy soul to be seeing Colonel McQueen from Space: Above & Beyond again. 24 can be fun to watch sometimes, but there are so many things about it that annoy me if I let them; it's nice to have him be on something else. I haven't gotten to watch as many episodes as I'd like to, but I've very much enjoyed all of the ones that I've seen, so.

Also: ( an awkward conversation with Br. ) Obviously, it's okay to dislike a ship, to not like slash very much or not like het very much or whatever it is - it's personal taste, it can't really be categorized as wrong, as incorrect. I think what bothers me about Br's gripe is that the way she phrased it moves the issue into, or at least toward, the realm of moral judgment, with her on the side of people who are capable of appreciating the beauty of strong, platonic male friendship, and people who ship things like Frodo/Sam on the side of the poor, lust-driven plebes who can't leave well enough alone and get all carried away with that wacky subtext crap.

Phew. Now that I've got that off my chest: shower time!

This whole survey thing really exploded, huh?

I've caught up on a lot of the posts about it between classes and such, and have found it hilarious and infuriating by turns. The "slash is like dudes liking transsexuals" comment was bewildering; the responses to it warmed the cockles of my heart. I think that what throws me the most is the staggering number of hugely broad assumptions they are working from already - they are treating things like givens when they are not actually givens, and that anybody who is supposedly some kind of qualified researcher would not know better than that blows my mind.

I have seen it mentioned that the people behind the survey have implied that, because they were not intending any minors to be involved, they did not need IRB approval. (Although I did not actually follow any specific link to a comment containing that implication, so I have no first-hand knowledge.) If that is the case, then I would like to weep for all the time I wasted filling out paperwork just to get an expedited review of my thesis project by UVM's IRB when no minors were going to be involved.

I'm not sure exactly what I was thinking when I first saw the banners for the survey going around; I've seen that kind of thing before for people's smaller statistics projects and such, and I guess I never really realized that this was at least trying to be an actual official research project. That being the case, the problematic survey items take on a whole new meaning. We spent ages in Measurement of Communication Processes learning about just how careful you have to be about everything when you're making a good survey, including the wording of the items and the various options for the response setup. We had to run our project surveys on a pilot sample and test the validity of the items and chuck the really awful ones and rephrase the only mildly terrible ones and argue for, like, a day and a half about whether we had really picked the right response setup. And that was just for a class project, not for something we were planning on turning into an actual research tool.

Other people have talked quite a bit about the myriad other problems, so: linkspam roundup. I would be so lost by these blowups if it weren't for these roundups.

... And now I have to go to Human Cultures. Sooner or later I will put up a riveting account of my Tuesday, though.

ETA: Obviously I should have checked my e-mail before I left, or I would have noticed I had a comment (on LJ, I mean) before this posted, but somehow my last post about the survey actually ended up in the linkspam. It's like I have some kind of actual presence on the internet or something. o.O

ETA 2: Also, something so basic I forgot to even mention it: every statistics class I have ever taken has hammered home the point that convenience samples are almost totally worthless. Obviously this is a situation where you are aiming to get a particular population, and so a convenience sample, as long as it's taken from that target population, is perhaps slightly less useless than usual, but.

There was some unexpected fail on the comics page of the paper this morning - at least, I think it was fail. Our local paper prints Ann Landers (well, the successor thereto, Annie's Mailbox) in amidst the comics, and it had a letter today from a man railing about how ridiculous it is for him to be expected to keep his eyes to himself when women wear slutty tight, low-cut, attractive clothes to work.

And the columnists agreed with him.

( The text of their reply reads: Some women think tight, low-cut clothing is attractive. Some women tease ... )

Usually, I find skimming Annie's Mailbox while I eat breakfast relatively pleasant; sometimes, they get incredibly stupid letters, and I enjoy watching the writers who've taken over deliver impeccably polite smackdowns. So it was pretty definitely unpleasant to finish this guy's screed (which included gems like "Why do young women dress to appear cheap and slutty? ... They convey a message of sexual availability. Yet if I notice, it must be because I'm ogling young girls, and shame on me," and "Women learn early on what gets a man's attention, but heaven help us if we look too long or respond in any way"), rolling my eyes the whole way, and then hit a reply like that.

( Further nattering. )

I'm not sure I'm being very articulate about this, because it's boggling me so much to be disagreeing so intensely with columnists whom I usually find at least moderately sensible. Maybe I'm just reading this all wrong? I don't know.

Anyway. In non-faily news, I have my final exam for Syntax to finish by tomorrow evening. Sadly, the class never really did pick up the way I was hoping; on the plus side, it filled a requirement, and at least it wasn't so difficult that it disrupted my thesis work. That would've sucked.

Speaking of my thesis: I did another interview this afternoon, at one o'clock, which was very long - we almost ran over the capacity of the memory chip in my digital recorder - and very satisfying. It makes up for the one I did on Monday; I forgot the recorder entirely at that one, and was too embarrassed to say so. Fortunately, I managed to contrive an excuse to talk to Monday's subjects again tomorrow, so I may still be able to get a decent speech sample from them. (Rescheduling that? One of the worst phonecalls of my life. Augh.) Also on the good side, it's possible that M, J, and K fit the criteria for interviewees - it would be very easy for me to interview them, I would get three interviews which would definitely be long enough (which is very much of the good), and it would be great to get some younger subjects, since my sample so far is not very diverse in terms of age.

So. Right. Syntax exam.

So Saturday was awesome. I walked stilts for so long that I actually kind of hurt my left foot a little bit; I think I made the foot-strap a little too tight, because the side of my foot, the place where the strap crossed around, was all weird and achy. I was anxious about the kids - and people in general, really, as I am good with neither - but it was like I was possessed, or something. People asked me questions, and I answered them! In a kind and friendly manner! \o/ I'm always particularly afraid of what to do when a kid says something I can't understand, or something kind of silly - like, one of them seemed to be having serious trouble grasping the entire structure of the stilts, and kept asking me what the wood was for - but it actually wasn't half bad.

Turns out that being on stilts brings the same set of questions to everybody's mind: how tall are you, how do you get up there, how did you learn, and is it hard. Plus, I have never had so many people try out the "How's the weather up there?" thing on me in my life.

The rest of the weekend was rather unremarkable in comparison. I find myself weirdly enjoying grocery shopping; there was a phase in between when I got to ride on the cart and now when I thought it was the most boring thing in the world, but that seems to be coming to an end.

Today was more weeding - no particularly good stories, sadly, although I do think I managed to make friends with both of Mary's cats - and also a marathon of The Closer. ( I kind of love The Closer. ) I'm actually typing this during spare moments of the season premiere, which, so far? Awesome.

I used my memories to collect a couple recent posts - specifically, cereta's post on men and rape, and a reaction to it. Reading it and the comments to it has been painfully illuminating; I'd call it a valuable experience for me, except that makes it sound like I'm okay with the pain some of the commenters have gone through because it taught ~*~me~*~ something, which, hell no.