damkianna: A cap of the Reverend Mother from the Dune miniseries, with accompanying text: "Space cowgirl." (Default)
So, I watched the newest (at least, I think it was the newest) ep of The Closer last night.

I had really mixed feelings at the outset, but I think overall more things ended up being right than wrong - I'm not sure, though, it still hasn't totally settled yet. My tentative perspective. Spoilery, natch. ) I was especially leery because of the whole VB-returns thing on F_W, and the attendant pronoun fail that is thankfully mostly over now; but I think the ending at least partially made up for the obnoxious parts of the beginning. I don't know, I'll have to let it percolate a little more.

In academic news, the World Lit final on Thursday went by without much of a hitch. I'm terrible at writing essays by hand, I get so tense I have to shake my hand out every few words or else I can barely write, but I think I managed okay. Then there was nothing until yesterday afternoon, which was the Cog-Neuro exam. I ... probably should have studied for that a little bit more than I did, but I think it turned out all right. This afternoon is Audiology, for which I plan to "study" by making myself a paper diagram of an audiometer and practicing in my room. Fortunately, I can do that without feeling like an idiot, because B finished her last exam and left for home yesterday afternoon. (I know this makes me a horrible person, but: \o/!)

So. Paper audiometer. Right.
damkianna: A cap of the Reverend Mother from the Dune miniseries, with accompanying text: "Space cowgirl." (Default)
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/
damkianna: A cap of the Reverend Mother from the Dune miniseries, with accompanying text: "Space cowgirl." (Default)
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/
damkianna: A cap of the Reverend Mother from the Dune miniseries, with accompanying text: "Space cowgirl." (Default)
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.
damkianna: A cap of the Reverend Mother from the Dune miniseries, with accompanying text: "Space cowgirl." (Cartographer)
Having yesterday off is screwing me up so badly; I kept thinking today was Monday, and then somehow it had switched to today being Wednesday by midmorning.

Still, I managed to keep my brain from making me miss any classes. Audiology was another stunningly dull review, this time about the anatomy of the ear, which I remember pretty clearly from Speech and Hearing - it wasn't the professor's fault it was dull, she was awesome as always. I have to remember to get my HIPAA training done again; no way am I going to find the certification form from last year, so I might as well do it again.

World Lit was the second half of Gilgamesh, and then a bunch of Egyptian love poetry; the poetry was a mix of dirty, funny, and beautiful that really worked for me. Unfortunately, I don't have my book for that class yet - although it should be on its way soon - so I can't repost any for future reference for a while. Sadface! On the plus side, the discussion was mildly interesting, and I had the presence of mind to write down a whole bunch of the cliché bingo prompts I still haven't written snippets for in my notebook, so I got a fair amount of brainstorming done, if not a huge amount of actual writing. \o/

Cog-Neuro wasn't bad in an objective sense, but there's something about the hour-and-fifteen minute classes that gets to me; I usually lose the majority of my powers of concentration at about the hour mark, and spend the last fifteen minutes fidgeting and counting down the seconds under my breath. ... That's probably a habit I should break.

I bought a new ID card. It has become a ritual for me to lose my student ID at least once a year; this year, I started early. Rather than waiting for it to find its way back to me, as it has with kind of bewildering regularity in the past, I decided to go ahead and shell out the $15 for a new one - the magnetic strip on the old one was starting to wear and need more than one swipe to work, so it was probably time. It's very weird, having a new one. I'm not even a tiny bit photogenic ... ) Whatever, I am so overthinking this. It's just an ID card, self! :D

Anyway. We have a coloring book for Cog-Neuro, along with a normal textbook; we had a whole handful of assignments in it, and I spent most of this afternoon on them, after buying myself some colored pencils at the bookstore. It felt weirdly adult, to have a need for something, and go, without asking anybody or telling anybody or anything, to buy it for myself. Which is, again, making a bigger deal than necessary out of something relentlessly ordinary, but that seems to be the order of the day, here.

B is still driving me crazy ... ) But other than that, it's all been much more tolerable.

Aaaaand now it's basically 11:30, and I have Human Cultures at 8:30 tomorrow, so.
damkianna: A cap of the Reverend Mother from the Dune miniseries, with accompanying text: "Space cowgirl." (Default)
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.

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damkianna: A cap of the Reverend Mother from the Dune miniseries, with accompanying text: "Space cowgirl." (Default)
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