nor so wide as a church door

B's mother and sister have come up for graduation - they came a little early, because B has some ceremonies and stuff she's going to before the actual graduation on Sunday, and arrived late last night. I like them both, but I think I've written before about B's mother; she's a pleasant person, but in any serious conversation, I think she and I would start to argue very quickly.

Case in point: our conversation today included her saying (almost verbatim) "There must be a husband in your future somewhere, right? You're such a nice girl!" Which ... I mean, clearly she intended to be complimentary and friendly, but the pure heteronormativity of it nearly choked me. It's possible she meant to link niceness and straightness, but I think it's loads more likely that it just never crossed her mind that I might be any flavor of queer, or that marriage might not be one of my goals in life, or anything else. But it was such an ordinary thing to say; it seems weird to make a big deal out of it, and yet it did grate. Bleh. :P

Anyway. I just let it pass at the time, and avoided the possibility of longer conversations that might shunt me into lecture mode by refusing all their invitations to meals - politely, and in a friendly fashion, of course. Well, okay, and also partly because I don't have much cash right now, and I'm not sure whether any of the ATMs on campus that I usually go to would be accessible. (I will have to check early tomorrow, as M, K, and Ka are coming up to visit, and I probably ought to feed them. :D)

So. Time to microwave me some assumption-free macaroni and cheese.

Well, that was not at all how I was planning to spend my Sunday morning. :P

B went out last night to go drinking and ( got back rather late. Cut for boring. ) Anyway, the short version is: I hate cleaning up vomit, but at least I wasn't on a moving bus with nothing but toilet paper this time.

I like B, and she definitely adds that certain something to my life, but I can't say I'm going to be sorry to move back home after graduation. ^^

Man, what a weekend.

Friday afternoon was lovely. The day was so beautiful that I took a walk down to the waterfront, which was spiced up somewhat by a small dog - hir owner complimented me on my skirt, which was very kind, and I guess the dog must've liked it, too, because zie tried to take a bite out of it. Fortunately, there was no damage to the skirt, so it all ended well (although the dog was sadly thwarted, I suppose). Then I sat on the rocks for nearly two hours, listening to music and enjoying the breeze and the view. Amusingly, when I was on my way back up, I ran into a woman who had been inside the salon right next to where the Dog Incident occurred, and she stopped me to tell me it had made her laugh - in a very friendly way, not, like, a mean way.

Unfortunately, Friday evening was ( somewhat less shiny. ) :P

Saturday, likewise, was shaping up to be a lovely day, as AT came by and we ended up going on another walk to the waterfront and talking for a while, and then walking back up, getting lunch and ice cream, and eating both while we watched more Burn Notice. (I've gotten her halfway through the second season, so far. \o/) And then I came back to the room, only for Bailey to turn to me, teary-eyed, and tell me that her mother had called to let her know that her cat had died.

Clearly, me taking walks to the waterfront is just a bad idea.

It looks like today's going to turn out all right, though. Easter mass this morning, and it was definitely more cheerful than Palm Sunday, which was nice; as a bonus, I actually knew one of the songs we were singing, which has never happened to me before. We sang much more than I was expecting, including some parts that are usually spoken, and I was also taken somewhat by surprise by the part where the priest came around and flicked water on everybody. :D Oh, Catholicism. Just when I think I've got the whole routine almost figured out, you throw me a curveball.

I'm still waffling over whether or not to sign up for ladiesbigbang - I'm leaning toward not, because that way I won't have to feel disappointed in myself if I don't finish the fic, but if I do get it done on time, I can still turn it in. Plus I don't need to make anybody produce a complement - I have my sister for that, we've already started trading chunks of story for art. :D I kind of can't believe how quickly Avatar: TLA has taken me over. I mean, I'm still chugging away at the HP AU, albeit a little more slowly because there's some background work I have to wrangle; but the Dead Moms are now edging toward forty things, and I've already got over 2,000 words of the fic I'm considering doing for ladiesbigbang. The concerns I have about being able to complete it for the 'bang are in terms of story completeness - somehow I don't think writing 15,000 words is going to be much of a strain. /o\ And yet I can't say, in the end, that I really feel all that faily for wallowing so gratuitously in awesome ladies.

... A little guilty, maybe, for the (ridiculous) amount of effort I'm willing to invest in it versus the (miniscule) amount I find myself caring about, say, Biology; granted. :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

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/

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.