nor so wide as a church door

My birthday was Monday; sadly, it was not wholly stress-free, since I had to do an interview, but it was pretty close. I got an early present over the weekend, so that some birthdaying could be done while my dad was still at home - it turned out to be an absolutely gorgeous antique typewriter, whose only flaw is that its spacebar is a little bit overenthusiastic. (Also the part where I can't save anything is very weird. There's no Ctrl key! I am so lost!) Bonus: I now understand why the Shift key is so named.

On my actual birthday, I got only one more present - my sister's present for me hasn't arrived yet, but that just means when I do get it (this weekend, I'm hoping) I'll have plenty of time to watch enjoy it. Whatever it is. Because I don't know. **cough**

Anyway. I got a Polaroid camera - the sort I remember from grade school, where the teacher took pictures and everybody fought over who got to wave it around 'til it developed. My mom went all old school on me this year. :D The cake was awesome, as always.

A few more wildlife encounters to document, also. The fuzzy cheerful one would be a very close pass by a deer in the car, going up the lower curve of the road my house is on; it was standing right by the guardrail, staring over it at me with its enormous eyes. The somewhat less pleasant one would be the one where Calvin caught a squirrel at the end of the walk, and, well. Suffice it to say that it did not end especially well for the squirrel, who now presumably roams the Great Pine Tree in the sky.

( A little fic chatter. )

Also, this song has been dogging me recently, so.

( J'ai compris que les années se passe vite ... )

And, of course, the translation - again, the work of my fading high school French.

( Translation! )

A BAFA is not quite a diploma, if I'm remembering correctly; it's more like some kind of youth leadership certificate. A ZUP is a zone à urbaniser en priorité, a "priority urbanization zone", which doesn't really condense to any succinct English phrase I can think of ("slum" has something of the same feel to it, the same sort of connotation, judging by the way one of my French teachers explained it, but it's not the right word - and, of course, the denotations are totally different).

Man, I get such a nerdtastic thrill out of translating things. :D

Kind of a lot, actually, considering how teeny an anecdote it is. See, we had these sheets handed out to us at the beginning of the year that we were meant to use to list a bunch of our favorite things and then pin to our doors; it was supposed to help us all bond. All it actually did was teach me that somebody across the hall thinks that Patrick Dempsey is their favorite actor even though they can't spell his name right, but points for effort on the RA's part.

There's a slot for favorite boardgame, and as I was going down the hall last night to get more water from the water fountain (you don't drink what comes out of the taps in our rooms. You just don't) I caught sight of the answer of the person across the hall, which made me think fondly of my own answer - Sequence, as it happens, for one very particular reason: it has become the boardgame of choice for my meet-ups with my friends from home. M, who is a peculiar combination of adept and inept when it comes to social situations - she doesn't have my paralyzing fear of ordering things or talking to people in stores, but she can sometimes be very hard to have a normal conversation with - and is very, very smart; J, who may not match up to M when it comes to academics, but has a way of wholeheartedly living her life that's kind of unintentionally charming; K, who is very nearly Luna Lovegood made manifest; and Q, who laughs at everything except her schoolwork, which she takes dead seriously. They're all a year younger than I am - I made friends with them relatively recently, during a period when I was slowly losing all the friends I had in my own grade to outside circumstances, and now they're my best friends in the world.

And I swear to god, I nearly started crying right there in the hallway. Okay, yes, I am a big squishyface; the end of HP:GoF has made me cry each of the, oh, three or four times I've watched it. But I do not usually start crying randomly in the hall! I had no idea that missing people could sneak up on you like that. I thought about it later while I was trying to get to sleep, and I almost started crying again. Good thing I only have to wait 'til Wednesday to get home for the summer. Yikes.

Fortunately, I have another anecdote, more cheerful, to balance that one out. I woke up this morning with the tail end of a dream of myself singing a song still in my head. Lyrics shortly, because it is kind of an awesome song, but there is ( also backstory here. )

The first time I heard the Beatles actually singing ... well, one of their own songs, I was shocked. Shocked! Who were these peculiar people singing King's Singers songs, and why, god, why was their tone quality so wretched? To this day, I have trouble listening to the actual Beatles, because all I can think is, "sweet god, your tone quality is like a cheese grater, where's my King's Singers playlist?" ... Elitist music-listener is elitist. :D

The song I dreamed of myself singing was not one of the Beatles', although it may have been preceded by listening to one; I don't know, my dream memory's pretty fuzzy after an hour and change. It was this one, which has been covered by everybody and their mother since it was composed in the late 1930s, based off of a poem by Jane Brown Thompson:

( Lyrics! )

Lovely song, both sad and a little funny, which is usually the sort I find the most wrenching. And, of course, to my mind, the King's Singers version is the REAL version. It's the one I heard first, THAT MAKES IT REAL.

Now, to finish up the thesis proposal revisions, and then I can e-mail my advisor to make sure I'll be able to get her to sign a physical copy before tomorrow afternoon. *crosses fingers*