nor so wide as a church door

Yay birthday yay! Thank you again to ilthit, and idriya gave me a present that is a present to the whole internets! I present: A:tLA icons liek whoa! HEARTS FOREVER. (Of course I immediately uploaded them all. :D)

And the TV is fixed! \o/ So I caught The Closer and Rizzoli & Isles, about which I have no deep thoughts except UGH I LOVE CAPTAIN RAYDOR SO MUCH and R&I made me cry a little even though the pacing was kind of weird for me. (I think I'm a little too used to L&O.) My dad got me five Errol Flynn movies (five!), and my mother got me a new skirt, and idriya got me AWESOME and ugh. What a fabulous birthday! My heart.

Now I'm going to go eat some more cake. :D

I know it does awful things to the roads, but god help me, I love freezing rain. I drove home last night and in this morning through a forest of trees silvered over with ice, curved like dancers with the weight of it. And, of course, since it's been sunny the past couple days, everything is sparkling! It is like Edward Cullen out there. THESE ARE THE TWIGS OF A KILLER, BELLA.

I celebrated International Women's Day by watching that M and James Bond video like fifteen times. Bandwidth well spent. Also, spent some time on Al Jazeera: Ivorian women protest over shootings of female protestors. (Possibly triggering for violence, but the picture with the article is kind of awesome.) And their liveblogging about Libya has been excellent.

I need to buy some more books. If I'm going to keep failing at keeping up with my TV shows, I need something else to occupy my brain. Also, idriya's birthday is coming up. TIME TO SHOP.

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!

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.

I've been sort of overdosing Harry Potter lately - first going to HBP, and then my mother got OotP on her Netflix because she couldn't remember anything about it, and we watched that, and then also I just got up the nerve to share the few chapters of the HP AU that I've actually written with M (she liked it! Although she's definitely the sort to say that, even if they were deeply terrible - though she would probably add a little concrit to the compliments, if she really didn't like it). So it's possible that I shouldn't be surprised that I had an ( HP-verse dream the other day. ) I very distinctly remember thinking at this juncture that I was a dreadful Mary Sue, because here I was, an original character (and a self-insert at that!), and I was beating Voldemort about the head with a jacket, and I wasn't dead. (And, of course, in a larger sense, I was fighting Voldemort, which was something Harry, or maybe some of the professors, ought to be doing.)

It was very odd, but rather a fun dream. I must add it to the list. That makes three flying dreams (one with wings, two where it was my superpower), a pirate dream (I was Elizabeth the Red, scourge of the high seas - mostly I remember the part where that was my name, and the part where I boarded a ship by swinging on a bit of rigging), and three fandom dreams (one SG-1, one J2, and this one).

I also must add to my wildlife count for the summer, with two more moles in Mary's garden, a wild turkey crossing the road on the way home, and a deer in the field across from my house, nomming very happily on some grass, and regarding my car with a very blasé kind of air as I passed it.

My thesis research is slowly but surely progressing; I have now completed three interviews, although one is probably not long enough to provide a good speech sample, and have two more scheduled for next week.

My mother is currently updating me daily on the tale of my birth, as my birthday approaches. My due date was three days ago, but my birthday's not until the third of August; I was very late indeed. (If I had been five minutes earlier, my birthday would be the second of August, but no; I felt it was best to wait until 12:04 AM of August third.) She loves to tell us these things, she does the same thing to my sister when March rolls around. I have done a little hinting around as to things I would like, and it looks like the first season of Burn Notice on DVD has a very good chance of happening. \o/!

Syntax is slowly leaching away my will to live. I appreciate the quirky beauty, the intricacy and arbitrariness, the flexibility, of English grammar, really. But I've taken, like, five classes on it. I was kind of hoping that this course would be a little more comparative - a little more about other languages, languages that are very different from English, languages with tenses and moods and particles and other things that don't exist in English. ... Sigh.

Thank god for conlanging, I guess. :D