nor so wide as a church door

I appreciate that shopping is fun for many people, but generally speaking, I really hate it. I don't mind the Nearly New Sale at home, and I don't mind shopping for small tchotchkes, but that's about it; and I am wretched at giving people advice. If you want a more detailed answer than "... Fine?" when you ask how something looks on you, DO NOT use me as your shopping companion.

This comes up, naturally, because B decided to go clothes shopping today. Long story short: it was basically my idea of hell. The end.

Before that, however, we went to see Letters to Juliet. I don't know whether anyone cares about spoilers, because after you've seen the preview, you've basically seen the movie, but just in case: ( cut! ) Bottom line: brain twinkie, but reasonably heartwarming. I wouldn't mind watching it again, but I'm not going to, like, chase after it.

Three days, and I get to go home. \o/!

Man, today was a long day - not a bad day, just a long one. Rain all day, which, I do not hate rain, but walking all the way down to Dewey Hall in it is not very much fun. And then Cog-Lang was cancelled, which was obviously good, but meant more walking in the rain than I would've had to do if class had been on. Hearing Rehabilitation was pretty soul-killing; I used to be vaguely interested in audiology, once upon a time, but spending this much time on how assistive devices all have microphones, and infrared waves are light but we can't see them, is just. **hands**

However, we did have kind of an interesting class the other week, where by "interesting" I mean it made me kind of uneasy and angry. ( tl;dr: deafness, Deafness, and cochlear implants. )

And then, of course, this weekend happened; AT's boyfriend, D, was up, so we watched a bunch of movies together, including ( The Princess and the Frog. Rife with spoilers. ) Overall, though, I liked it reasonably well. It's not a favorite, but I'd watch it again.

And Sunday afternoon, of course, was Palm Sunday. I did not realize this until I actually got to the Catholic Center, and saw the palm leaves on the table in the lobby, waiting to be blessed. It was very interesting - I was totally clueless about the reading of the Passion, I almost had a heart attack when people started passing missals around because I had no idea what they were doing. I have to admit that I cried a little; the concept of crucifixion is so awful that I can make myself cry just by imagining it a little too vividly, and reading it combined with singing the really lovely responsorial psalm, my God, my God, why have you abandoned me - well. I'm a soft touch. Watching the GoF movie makes me cry, too, and I've seen it at least four times.

Fortunately for my dignity, we had a visiting ... uh, official of some kind - he did the blessing of the palms, and the sermon. And - I know this is awful, but there was something a bit unusual about the way he said things, and he had the hat, and all I could think of the whole time he was talking was the Impressive Clergyman from The Princess Bride. /o\ I am so ashamed. (There was also a moment where he presented political correctness as in opposition to the truth, which was frustrating.)

Anyway. Easter next week - with mass in the morning, instead of the evening. Presumably that one will be a little more cheerful. Plus, I finally get to eat the box of Peeps I've been saving since spring break. :D

I am tired of being terrible at titling my posts, and so have decided to go the pretentious route: moderately appropriate song lyrics with no capital letters. \o/ I see no way in which this can fail me.

The reason this line applies is because on Friday, I had my first meeting of Music in Live Performance, a one-credit class I'm taking because AT asked me to and I am a doormat. :D It's not really much of a class: we go to the space where one of the five concerts we'll be attending is being held, and talk to the performer(s) for half an hour, and then stay for the concert. And at the end, we have to turn in some kind of journal thing, so that they can actually have something to grade.

Anyway, Friday's concert was performed by this man, who is pretty fabulous. The people in the course came early, and we ended up climbing up onto the stage and singing a piece of shape-note music with him, which was lovely. I cannot read music, but fortunately we went through it a few times, and that's generally all I need to be able to sing something reasonably well. (If we operationalize "well" as a measure of right notes hit, not quality of voice, that is.) He tended to favor a style of music that I rather like, although my favorites were the more up-tempo ones.

The reasoning behind the title is that one of the songs he sang during the concert was a version of the same story that is told in the song "The Cruel Sister", of which the title is the first line. His version was a bit abbreviated, in addition to differing in the details: the minstrel made a fiddle out of the dead sister's bones and hair, not a harp, and when he played it, it would only make the sound of wind and rain; the song ended without the minstrel going back to the family's house and playing the instrument at the cruel sister's wedding, and so the crime was never revealed. He also sang a version of another song that I know best because the Old Blind Dogs sang it, this one being "Edward", except in this one, the brother was killed, not the father, and, again, it ended early - the narrator settled for exiling himself, and didn't go into how he was going to let his castle fall into disrepair, leave his family to beg for a living, and curse his mother to Hell.

... Oh, traditional music. How so bloodthirsty?

I also got reintroduced to my own subconscious Eurocentrism; I experienced a brief and damning moment of surprise when AT revealed that she was not acquainted with Ichabod Crane or the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, despite being well aware that AT's cultural background is Viet, and she would have no reason to know either. Which reminds me of ( yet another time B has nearly made me blow my stack. ) Argh.

Still, it was not nearly as bad as ( the flag conversation. )

... it's only until May, it's only until May, it's only until May ...

In less infuriating news, I had two Harry Potter dreams that I only vaguely remember, and a third about spiders that was truly awful (one of them was huge and black and shiny and under my bed, and the other was smaller and kind of like a daddy longlegs but then it grew and grew and its body was all fat and squishy when I kicked it out the door except then I was trapped inside with the big black one-), all on the same night. I must have been sleeping pretty badly, to wake up three times, but fortunately I could nap the day after.

Also, despite having to study for a Hearing exam that was moved up, and slogging dutifully away through my thesis, I've still managed to get to the fourth chapter of the second book of the HP AU. Which may be due to the fact that I spent all of my classes on Tuesday writing in my fic notebook, and managed to get down a very pleasing ~2,000 words. I am such a terrible student. /o\ I also watched the first Narnia movie today, because it came through my Netflix, and, man, if you're looking for it at all, the Peter/Edmund just leaps off the screen and slaps you in the face. (Then again, I may be biased; most of what I remember about the second one consists of Peter and Caspian smoldering at each other and Susan's battle eyeliner.)

That was ... maybe a smaller wall o' text than usual? I'm trying to cut down a little. :D

First, a meme! From various places, I forget whose journal I saw it on first.

1. Write down the names of 10 characters.

2. Write a fic of fifteen words or fewer for every prompt, using the characters determined by the numbers. Do NOT read the prompts before you do step 1.

1. Harry Dresden (Dresden Files)
2. Morgana (Merlin)
3. Gwen (Merlin)
4. Karrin Murphy (Dresden Files)
5. Hellboy (Hellboy [movie])
6. Arthur (Merlin)
7. Susan Rodriguez (Dresden Files)
8. Merlin (Merlin)
9. Liz Sherman (Hellboy [movie])
10. John Myers (Hellboy [movie])

I ... failed utterly at sticking to the letter of this meme; apparently I'm almost incapable of expressing myself in exactly/under fifteen words. But I kept them all to under twenty-five words, at least. >.> <.< That totally counts. Also, the lack of variety in fandoms is a little pathetic. /o\ I am so bad at branching out.

( Eleven indubitably lame ficlets! )

Kind of figures my first genuine postage of fic would be a bunch of teeny chunks that'll never go anywhere. Although I am actually almost tempted to keep going with a couple of those - never mind the eighty billion things I ought to finish first. Curse you, finals week. I shake my fist in your general direction.

In the unfunny business end of things, I almost cried in Human Cultures today, out of sheer frustration-by-proxy. We finished up the second half of the final part of A Kalahari Family, the documentary by John Marshall, and jesus. Every single time there was a clip of yet another white "expert" talking about how the !Kung were so ~close to nature~, I wanted to punch somebody in the face, because it was so transparently an excuse to keep on failing to actually do anything helpful - like, say, get supplies to fix the pumps needed to keep the !Kung farms running. (Which, I might add, were only broken in the first place by elephants, who, according to Marshall, are not native to the area; they were brought in to give tourists something ~African~ to goggle at.) It was disgusting.

I will say it made me really glad I decided to start using Kiva: I'm not completely useless! Mostly useless, sure, but not completely! \o/

My to-do list at the moment mostly consists of my Human Cultures film journal, which is due next Wednesday, and starting to study for both the last Human Cultures quiz (also Wednesday) and my World Lit final (Thursday, aka the first day of final exams). No matter how many semesters I do this, I'm always so blindsided by finals. The end of the semester seemed so far away before Thanksgiving!

This is probably going to end up a huge, unwieldy monster of a post, but, again, I have accumulated absolute oodles of things to say.

So.

( I went home this past weekend. )

The guineas are enormous - they've got to be at least five or six times as big as they were when they were newly-hatched and fluffed out, and their feathers have come out very fast. Fortunately, their heads haven't changed much, so you can still tell Clary, DG, and Evey apart by looking at the sides of their faces; but I expect that won't last too much longer. Maybe we should write the first letters of their names on their legs with a Sharpie, or something.

While I was at home, I resumed my usual pose of sloth on the couch, which was how I came to end up watching ( Blade: Trinity. ) And it was very weird to see Ray Kowalski CKR as a bad guy yet again - I don't even know why that weirds me out so much, it's not like I've actually watched due South, and yet a combination of people's icons and Googling have imprinted him on me as RayK. Oh, and John Doe as Dracula was just ... wow. That was very strange. (Not that he didn't do a good job, or anything, but John Doe was so ... well, okay, mild-mannered is the wrong word, considering some of the stuff he did on the show, but.)

When I came back to UVM on Sunday night, B wasn't in the room, so I went upstairs, to visit my suitemates from last year - let's say Br and AT, if I haven't already called them something else. Anyway, they were watching ( Penelope, which I have already seen once before. ) And, lastly, thank you so very much, every bandom fic that has ever made any mention of the potential resemblance between Gerard Way in drag and Christina Ricci; it was like an optical illusion, my brain kept flipping back and forth between what was actually happening in the movie and "omg if I squint like this I can pretend Gerard Way and James MacAvoy are gazing soulfully at each other!!!1!"

I'd natter some more about my classes, but there's not a lot to say. I am still mildly underwhelmed by Audiology; as always, I love the professor, but she spent at least half an hour explaining something that seemed ... only the slightest bit tricky, if even tricky at all, to me. :P I did finally get my books for World Lit; the Egyptian poetry is just as awesome as I remember, and I want to dust off that one conlang and try translating a few; hopefully, I'll get around to that during all my free time tomorrow. And Cog-Neuro is still simultaneously dizzying and boring, a combination which is not exactly improved by the stultifying heat in that classroom. Blegh.

I did finally manage to force out the seventeenth chapter of the HP AU, which is good, because that was really tripping me up; the beginning of the eighteenth has come much more easily, which hopefully means I won't get quite as stuck on it. And all my free time so far has been incredibly good for my cliché-fic - I now have a bewildering one hundred and eighty-one (181!) snippets, of varying length and equally varying odds of ever being finished, over ... four fandoms (well, four fandoms if you don't count the ones the crossovers cross over with, at least). I am simultaneously impressed and unimpressed with myself.

I have a super thrilling pair of accounts to add to my collection of wildlife stories, both of them to do with what I'm fairly sure were great blue herons. \o/

Account #1: ( My mother bought some kayaks this summer. )

And then there comes Account #2, where ( not a day, later, my sister and I are driving home from the grocery store, and what do we get stuck behind? )

I'm pretty sure I've seen herons around before, but at a much greater distance - sometimes we'd catch sight of one in the lagoon by the Montshire, and that kind of thing, but nothing like this. It was wonderful.

Anyway, on to slightly less interesting things - my birthday. Again. My sister's TTLY UNKNOWN present for me ended up getting sent to her old address at Clark University, which is where she graduated a little over a year ago; no word yet on whether they'll be sending it on. (I just hope they caught it in the office before it got to anybody's box; I can't imagine anybody passing on a free copy of ... uh, whatever it is.) However, this tragic news was made up for by the party my friends threw for me yesterday, which was lovely: we made cake and cupcakes and icing ourselves, before going to see Julie & Julia, and then coming back, making dinner, and nomming away. We also played games - Set, and Sequence, and way too many rounds of Spoons. (Sometimes we play things that don't start with S, I promise.)

K, who is very artistically inclined and does beautiful, rather impressionistic paintings of scenery, gave me one such painting; M gave me a lovely, barely-used copy of the fourth Harry Dresden book in French. ("Les Dossiers Dresden - Le Chevalier D'Été"! It's too bad the title puns don't work in French.) Which has had the bonus effect of broadening my library of French books to something other than the second and third Harry Potter books and Le Petit Prince. Not that I don't love reading Harry Potter in French, but it's usually less an exercise for the atrophying French parts of my brain, and more "... Oh, hey, so that's how you say that sentence - which I remember verbatim because I've read HP waaaaaaaaaaay too many times - in French!".

Because I have nothing better to do right now: ( Julie & Julia. ) It was good; it's not the love of my life, it doesn't reduce me to exclamation points and keyboard smashing, but it was sweet and fun to watch and it made me smile, and sometimes that's all I really want from a movie.

I had a brief argument with J while we were waiting for the movie over two things: first, RDJ as Sherlock Holmes, and second, the concept of slash. ( Explanation and further thoughts on the first. ) If somebody's going to remix me a funny, gritty, possibly wacky new take on Sherlock Holmes with RDJ and Jude Law in, I am totally okay with that, even if it does deviate from canon. I mean, obviously, I don't know; maybe it's going to be terrible and stupid and I'm going to hate it and wish I had never bothered arguing with J about it based on nothing more than a preview. But I have to say, at this point it looks exactly like my kind of movie.

The second was actually less an argument, and more a brief discussion where J said something I disagreed strongly with, I gave an audible rebuttal that was kind of half-hearted because I didn't want to blow things out of proportion, and then I spent a while poking at it in my head afterward. ( The basic context is that M said that she didn't really understand what slash was; J's response was that it was crack. ) I think J has adjusted her position somewhat since that point - going to Mount Holyoke has loosened her up a fair bit as far as issues of sexuality go - but I think I had been hoping it had been adjusted further than the baby step between "people only write slash because there's not girls enough for pairing fic" and "people only write slash because they like how crazy the whole idea is". Here's hoping that sooner or later I can maybe get her all the way to "people write slash for all kinds of different reasons, including 'because they ship it, and not as a crackship'", I guess.

And, wow, this got long. Clearly today is a wordy day for me - I should go rack up some wordcount on something, before the spirit of verbosity abandons me.

First, a little lyrics spam - I have memorized this song, and have been singing it to myself in the car on the way to and from work for the past couple of weeks. I figure I might as well preserve it for myself, in case I ever forget it.

( Lyrics to The Laughlin Boy. )

There's a chorus - listen to me, children, well, I wouldn't tell a lie - but I'm not super-fond of it, and also I don't remember between which verses it repeats, so. I'm fond of this song partly because it's the only one I can think of written in this story-of-a-hero kind of way about a conscientious objector, and partly because Tracy Grammer's voice is fine. I have got to get my hands on some more of her music, because, damn. There's something about the tone quality of her voice that I just love.

The second ep of Warehouse 13 was ( overall probably not as good as the pilot - teeny spoilers, probably no one cares. ) I think it's possible that they're trying a little too hard to be ~original~; I want to say, like, guys, it is srsly okay if you pick well-known or obvious or predictable artifacts, I am here for partner dynamics and banter. Still, I can't convince myself to drop it; I have already written snippets of ten (TEN! AUGH) Cliché-Bingo-based fics about Pete and Myka, and at least five more are trying to get out. My life is so hard.

BURN NOTICE. YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY. That is pretty much all I have to say about that. I know it's maybe a little silly, but I kind of love the ones where Michael wins people over through his noble refusal to leave them behind/let them get hurt/what-have-you - and also I am a sucker for Sam and Fi coming to the rescue. And his mom, OMG ♥. Madeline is MADE OF AWESOME. \o/ If I love this show any harder, I'm going to break something.

Tonight is Harry Potter Night, pretty much; my friends and I are all getting together to see HP6 this evening ... in costume, because we are all GINORMOUS DORKS. M is going to be Professor Trelawney, with scarves and bracelets and big glasses; J is going to be Tonks - she is for serious dedicated, she will be dying her hair pink; K is going to be Luna, because she pretty much is anyway; and Ka is probably going to be Narcissa Malfoy, as she is tall and pointy and blond. (Q is in Boston, doing an internship.) I was briefly contemplating being McGonagall, as I have a plaid nightgown (she totally had a tartan dressing gown on for about a page of OotP, okay, it is a TTLY VALID COSTUME), but then I had an apostrophe epiphany, and decided to be Irma Pince instead. I can totally rock a stern librarian outfit. And also I'll feel like not too much of a weirdo if nobody else besides us is dressed up, which is something I could probably not pull off in the nightgown.

In thesis news, I finally got the whole IRB thing sorted out, and made my first four calls to prospective interviewees today; I've got one set up for next Wednesday, and left three messages. \o/!

The rain was interfering with our TV reception last night, so instead of watching The Colbert Report, my sister and I ended up watching her latest Netflix movie, which was The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.

( Of the good. )

( Of the not-so-good. )

In conclusion: I would give a lot for some kind of epic Lin backstory fic, because she is awesome (she guards tombs! using fighting moves she was taught by her mother! whom she has a very strong relationship with! also she calls yeti!) and we didn't learn nearly enough about her.

ETA: ( For contrast, a little bibbling about my sekrit love: The Scorpion King. ) Suffice it to say that if I had to pick which one of these to watch again, I know which one I'd choose, and it wouldn't be Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.

Today was another TV day - I can't help it, I didn't have a TV at school and I missed it. *hugs TV* (Side note: HOLY SHIT I CAN'T WAIT FOR BURN NOTICE TO COME BACK. I keep seeing commercials for it, like, every five minutes on USA, and they make me squee like a freak every time. BURN NOTICE. OMGGGGG.)

Anyway, I ended up watching ( Starship Troopers. )

I have more to babble about, but we're leaving for the Star Trek movie in about two minutes, so I should get moving. Also: a thunderstorm moved in during the last half-hour, complete with hail, and damned if it didn't sound like God was emptying a big bucket of marbles on the house. Yikes.

ETA: ( More thoughts! Probably less organized, because I am still coming down from Star Trek! )

Sadly, I can't really comment on the ending. I'm not really all that good at watching movies that involve a lot of really gratuitous physical violence: I can practically make myself throw up just by thinking about the one five-minute section of the Kill Bill movies that I actually saw, and the sheer sadism in The Dark Knight has made me cry through the entire thing both times I've watched it. I hung on pretty well through this one, but then I got to the part where ( - spoiler? This movie's pretty old, but just in case - ) and that was just it for me. No more. :P So.

I appreciate it. Really, I do. Even if it was coming down hard enough to wake me up early this morning. I will forgive you almost anything, outdoors, if it can always be fifty degrees or cooler when I wake up in the morning.

Sadly, I suspect it is not to be, since the forecast says it'll be eighty-five (eighty-five! Kill me now!) tomorrow. *ded* And I have gym, too. DNW!

But I appreciate the effort, outdoors. It's the thought that counts.

Let's see. Can I think of anything else to blather about before I start doing actual work? Oh - well, yesterday, ( I saw Disney's Robin Hood for the first time ... )

... This is turning into some kind of bizarro meta review thing for a really old Disney movie that very few people probably care about, which wasn't really my intention. I was just trying to get out of doing work for a little bit! Suffice it to say that it wasn't bad; having seen it, I feel a lot of the kind of nostalgic affection for it that I do for 101 Dalmatians, or The Jungle Book, simply due to the style and the sort of innocent, old-fashioned morality it expresses. But if I had the choice between it (or either of those other movies) and, say, Beauty and the Beast? ... Yeah. I know which one I'm gonna watch.