nor so wide as a church door

Last final this afternoon - Cognition and Language, which was actually kind of nice, because I'm doing pretty well in that class.

It's weird to be essentially done, even if it doesn't really count for almost two more weeks. I can't say that I really loved college, although I can think of ways in which it was probably really good for me - although I do think that the vast majority of any improvement I've made as a person since freshman year was ... mostly because of fandom, not school. I cried like a hungry, angry baby when I picked up my cap and gown for high school graduation, and not in the good way - in the way where I was pretty much wrecked over everything I was leaving behind. But now? ... Not so much. I mean, I feel sort of nostalgically fond of this place, and I bet I always will. But that's not really the same thing. :P

And I guess this isn't a bad time to round up some WinCon unfunny posts for myself. Given the topic of discussion, there is potentially triggery stuff on the other ends of ... probably most of these links: Unfunnybusiness post; seperis; seperis follow-up; musesfool; tzikeh; sparky77; seperis a third time; mistresscurvy; tabaqui. I don't think that's everything I've read about it, but I got to everything I've read about it through some combination of these posts, so. I'm severely not on board with victim-blaming, but everything I could say about that has been said, and, once again, far more articulately. So all I've got left is to say that I really, really wish people would remember more often to throttle their first defensive reaction to any accusation of wrongdoing, and stop to take a careful look at the actions that led to the accusation, instead.

... Now that I've said that, of course, I'm guaranteed to forget it myself at some future date and end up looking like a complete ass, but. There it is.

Anyway, now that I can cross exams and my own personal linkspam off my list, back to the important stuff: my ladiesbigbang fic.

Finals feel like they are iiiiiiiiinching closer, as slowly as possible. :P I'm going to be so fried by the time they actually get here, just from the stress of anticipation.

Also, half as a reminder to myself: I'm going to try to remember not to crosspost to LJ, as a kind of symbolic gesture towards the three_weeks_for_dw event - this is not going to be three weeks of riveting! creative! content, or even three weeks of lame banal content that anyone is going to care about. But DW is my primary home, I crosspost from it to LJ instead of the other way around, and ... idk, even a little bit counts?

It snowed like mad today - today, in late April, which even in Vermont is not a common thing to have to say, though I don't think it's the absolute summeriest snow I've ever seen. Oh, weather.

Also today: the final CCC exam. And man, is it a relief to have that over with - not because I was stressing about the exam itself so much as because the CCC exams have a take-home pre-exam essay portion that is absolutely awful. Not challenging; relentlessly tedious. It was relentlessly tedious to write it for the midterm, and it was relentlessly tedious this time, too. :P Seriously, it was like pulling teeth, except even pulling teeth has some interesting, if sharply painful, moments. I know I should be grateful that it was take-home, and that it was easy and tedious, not difficult and tedious, but yikes.

After that, though, it was all smooth sailing and my progressively-less-tentative ladiesbigbang story, which is seriously filling up my fic notebook. I ... might actually sign up. D: I'm frightened of doing that because it means a visible contract to actually put my writing where other people besides my sister can read it, which is deeply terrifying to me; but I'm already only a thousand words away from the minimum, so it's not like I have to worry about having nothing by the deadline, even if what I have is 15k of crap. **hands** idk, I still have, like, two days to think about it.

Oh - and I also broke my record for consecutive hours of consciousness. \o? B had to print out her thesis: three copies, one for each of her defense committee members, and the whole thing with cover and bibliography and all was close to eighty pages. A lot, but not bad, except that she doesn't have a printer. So we used mine, which is a creaky old all-in-one ink printer - I am very fond of it, but it's not going to be setting speed records any time soon. Plus, I had to edit B's thesis before she could print it. I mean, because she asked me to, but secretly, I was just dying to - I've edited B's papers before, and she is just WRETCHED at sentence structure. Like, really abysmal. So that took a while, and then printing out about two hundred and forty pages with my printer was at least a couple hours more. So, in the end, we were up until about 4:00 AM printing.

4:00 AM being past the point where my brain says, "Fuck it," and stops asking me to go to sleep, even getting into bed and lying down and closing my eyes wasn't enough to knock me out. I wobbled and giggled my way through class the next day - apparently sleep deprivation makes me happy - and went to bed early, for a grand total of about thirty-eight hours awake. Good times.

I've also been amusing myself by going back through the the_hms_stfu archives and enjoying the lolariousness - not that I don't love the stuff that's posted in the comm now, but it's fun to go back to the old days sometimes. Plus, I happened upon a Ron!hate essay that I have been greatly enjoying tearing apart in spare moments.

And now, back to the fic. To sign up, or not to sign up ...

I don't know whether I'm imagining these things, or it's getting close enough to the end of the school year that I'm just sick of everything, or what, but watching these cochlear implant videos in Hearing Rehab is starting to seriously make me angry.

( Cut for moderate amounts of rage. )

There was also a girl near the front of the room who asked a question about something being different for the deaf/Deaf versus "normal people"; I'm hoping she just wasn't thinking about her wording, but I still wanted to smack her.

Anyway. The biology exam took less than half an hour, and a lot of that was just because I'm not especially quick when I write by hand, so the question at the end that was meant to be answered in a paragraph or two took me a bit. I almost feel guilty, in a weird way; I spent the last however-many classes listening to music and paying not even a tiny bit of attention, and kind of half-assed my way through studying yesterday, and I still left kind of early.

CCC was kind of interesting, just because I always get curious when people start talking about Mean Girls-type relational aggression. That kind of thing has pretty much never happened to me, and either I'm ridiculously oblivious, or there wasn't much of it going around my high school; so it always draws me in a little to hear people talking about it IRL, because the only place I've really seen it is in movies and TV shows.

Mostly, though, the big milestone for today was that - despite my aforementioned slowness at hand-writing things - I somehow got over a thousand words of what may become my ladiesbigbang fic down in my notebook. /o\ This would never have happened in high school, man.

This is going to seem very peculiar and/or suspicious in light of my last post, but I have taken the first steps on the rocky road to dropping my thesis.

Actually, I think writing that post was part of what prompted me to spend yesterday evening, and this morning, taking a long, hard look at where exactly my thesis is, and where it's going; and it didn't look good. I have a lot of work left to do, and not a lot of time to do it. If it were a matter of effort, yeah, I'll admit I would have trouble mustering the energy to really try; but I don't actually even think it's about needing to up my level of effort anymore, it just literally can't be done in the time allotted.

I e-mailed the Dean of the HCol this morning to ask him what would happen if I came to the conclusion that I could not finish my thesis; he didn't really answer that question directly, just told me to come see him. I just finished a long, teary phone call to my mother that helped me sort out a lot of how I'm feeling about it - my mother is awesome, I totally don't deserve her, but don't tell her I said that - and shot off an e-mail to the Dean's assistant to set up an appointment.

... I have to say, I feel awfully relieved. I think I do still want to work through my data, finish coding and put it through Goldvarb and everything, just because I've put too much time and work in to not learn what I went into this to find out; but it'll be a big load off my mind, not trying to force myself to finish the unfinishable. I know this is both nerdy and massively presumptuous, but I feel sort of like I'm Sisyphus, and I just got permission to let go of that stupid rock and stop worrying about it.

Now, to study for that Hearing Rehab exam I have this afternoon. \o?

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.

Whew. It's been a while; I've been busy and lazy by turns, and occasionally lazy in order to put off impending busy times. :P

I'm actually pretty pleased with ( my selection of classes for this semester. ) It's a pretty good bunch to be taking the semester I'm going to be working on my thesis, I think; I should have a lot of free time to work, which is a big relief.

B, I am less pleased with, but I was kind of expecting that. :D I can't wait to get through the acclimatization week and back to the point where most of what she does doesn't bother me, but, man, it always seems to take forever. For somebody who's done so many papers on prostitution, and is always insisting that sex is what makes the world go 'round, she's not very sex-positive; she uses insults like "slut" and "whore" a lot, and it gets on my nerves with a vengeance. And she's just plain terrible at sympathizing with or understanding any perspective other than her own, which is part of a bigger problem she seems to have with understanding that generalizations mean pretty much squat as far as individual people are concerned.

But I can't let it annoy me; I just have to keep trying to change her mind in small increments, and not get angry.

... sigh.

Fortunately, I have other things to occupy me, like the transcription I really ought to be doing right now, and some short papers for various classes that I want to try to get done so that I can focus on my thesis later. So.

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

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/

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 so many things to say today!

First, my Tuesday-Thursday classes:

( Audiology. )

( World Literature. )

And ( Cognitive Neuroscience. )

The other thing, which could totally make a post all on its own, is my roommate, B, who is driving me crazier than usual. I met her in freshman year; she was the first friend I ever made in college. ( She was my opposite in almost every way at the time. ) I'll be the first to admit that I don't know nearly enough about these issues, and it feels awkward to post about it with myself cast as some kind of white knight when actually it's just that I'm slightly less uninformed than B, but it's starting to bother me so much that I just can't keep my mouth shut.

But enough srs business; M, J, K, Ka, and Q will be here in a few minutes, since they've driven up to visit, so I should hit post on this monstrosity and then go meet them.