Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup -- Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup
I consider myself congenitally allergic to cat poems, as a rule, but this one so often applies in this house that I think it's necessary to link it at least once in the life of my blog.
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11:09:42 AM,Thursday 10 June 2004
Last night I read what eventually turned out to be a pretty dumb book, but boy it had a lot of words I didn't know.
Pleasure.
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12:41:43 AM,Thursday 10 June 2004
Uppå Marmorns Höga Berg (Up a Marble Mountain) came from Sweden today! And it seems, at least on first listen, to be both quite different from and every bit as glorious as Rosenbergs Sjua's R7, one of my very favorite albums of all time! So WOOO!
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10:14:23 PM,Wednesday 9 June 2004
Hail again! Yeee!
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06:54:35 PM,Wednesday 9 June 2004
Show of hands, please. How many of you, in your respective workplaces, have been required during the course of your official duties to read and initial any document containing the sentence: "Good luck with your lifelong adventure to normal bowel function."?
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(3)
09:35:13 AM,Wednesday 9 June 2004
A babyechidna is called a puggle.
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(1)
08:41:19 PM,Tuesday 8 June 2004
Pairs of pants I own that fit me comfortably: Six.
Pairs of pants I own that fit me comfortably and don't have an enormous gaping hole in the crotch: Two.
I'm thinking maybe I might possibly need new pants, a bit.
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(2)
06:25:38 PM,Tuesday 8 June 2004
Last night during the course of a conversation on various related things I went and dug up my least favorite Donne poem of all time. God, I hate it. Grargh slargh blargh. And then, this morning, I find that the guy who hosts the site it's on is a Johnny, woo. And I was reading some random blogs and trawling through random archives and thinking about school and study and hard work and grades and books and jobs (I'll be hanged before I write for Cliffs Notes, damn you) and everything... and here it comes again. Jonesing for Johnnyhood. Oof. I wonder if I'd miss it as much as I do if I had really poured my all into it when I was there. I loved it so much, I was so goddamn happy every hour I spent in class -- and yet, when it came to doing anything more than seminar readings (pretty much all the time), lab readings (most of the time), papers (at the last goddamn minute, every goddamn time) and cursory glances over the rest... I couldn't bring myself to it. What was wrong with me? It's not like I was out reveling instead of working. I holed myself up in my dorm room and lazed out the hours, always intending, in the next five minutes, to start doing what I was supposed to, and always giving up and going to bed at four in the morning instead. Did I find so much satisfaction at being barely able to squeak by, doing each paragraph of Greek or French in my head while the one before it was being translated by the kid next to me? At being able to smoke through my orals with papers that were hammered together over eight hours of sleep dep and turned in with the typos still steaming? I got As on those, right, so if I actually edit the next one I'll win the freakin' essay prize! What bullshit. Just meant I drove myself crazy for a month and spewed out a B-grade mediocrity Senior year. Was I afraid that if I worked as hard as I possibly could and was still unable to do more than follow along with the math as each step was worked out that it meant there was something wrong with my mind after all? I loved it. I loved every freaking thing we studied, whether I was good at it or not. Maybe if I had checked my grades after each semester instead of waiting 'til the middle of Junior year to see what they were for the first time, I would have woken up a bit. I don't know. At my don rags, the tutors always told me what I wanted to hear. "Ms. Knight is clearly enjoying the material, though she has a shaky grasp of certain technical details. But her papers -- which tend to be a little purple, though the arguments are well-reasoned -- show that her overall theoretical sense is sound." Which meant: I never did my homework, but I paid attention to the smart kids' summings-up. Which meant that, hell, we're all breeding generalists, here, right? Aristotle can forget to count teeth, and I can forget a proposition halfway through presenting it. Everyone else will help me limp to the end -- that's what cooperative inquiry's all about! Argh. I've got to cure this, or I can't ever respect myself. It's at the root of the difference between what I want to be and what I fail to be, and it's not an Askeladden-style Kill-The-Troll quest that'll fix it. It's got to be done gradually, gruelingly, and over years and years until it incorporates itself into my head and my habits. Out with the Happy Slacker. It's served its purpose. I want it gone.
Even if I had been the Uberjohnny, though, I'm pretty sure I'd still get these fits of missing it. It was the only four years of my life during which I was doing exactly what I wanted to do, every day and every hour, for its own sake. For the pleasure and the heat of it. Anyone who gets that is lucky, 'cause too few people do. I just wish I hadn't squandered it.
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(1)
04:59:22 PM,Tuesday 8 June 2004
The Speaker internal organs. Expanding, if you turn on the switch, it can perform directly.
both via Enorgis.
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(1)
11:36:49 PM,Monday 7 June 2004
It's been months since I read Microserfs, but it just now occurred to me. If my life was a game of Jeopardy! my seven dream categories would be:
Mozart Operas
Accents of the British Isles
Norse Fairy Tales
Uncommon Comestibles
Inverts of Letters
Double Dactyls
Plague
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(1)
09:47:27 AM,Monday 7 June 2004
I just made a very strange mix.
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(5)
07:48:31 AM,Monday 7 June 2004
Pizza fashioned after the one served to Queen Margherita of Naples in 1889 from the Fireplace and black licorice ice cream from the Big Dipper. Heaven.
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(1)
11:54:54 PM,Sunday 6 June 2004
I got my hailstones after all! Scads! Hordes! It's still at it! WOOHOOOO!
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(2)
07:16:26 PM,Sunday 6 June 2004
I think we just got our first summer hail. It clattered like anything. But when I ran bare-ass from my bedroom and spied out the door to the deck, intending to go stand in it and offer up my orisons, I saw that all but one or two of the stones had melted into a fierce cold rushing rain. It's subsided now. I can still hear it, barely, just trickling. Real quiet. But it was a righteous downpour for a minute or two. I was too shivery and cowardly to stand in it if I wasn't going to get any hailstones for my trouble. Wonderful to see it pool and break on the planks, though.
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03:03:04 AM,Sunday 6 June 2004
Hours of Television: ~1 (52 minutes)
Books: 3 (Asimov Laughs Again by Isaac Asimov, Diary of a Madman and Other Stories by Nicolai Gogol, and Strange Attractors by Rebecca Goldstein.)
Tuesday June 1 to Present (I guess I'll edit this entry if I finish the book I'm currently reading within the week, but I don't anticipate watching any more television 'til Tuesday when I go back to work. I generally don't, when I'm at home):
Hours of Television: ~2 (two half hour shows, one hour show, and five or ten minutes misc.)
Books: 3 (An Excellent Mystery by Ellis Peters, Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, and Dealing With Dragons by Patricia Wrede)
So far so good, huh?
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(2)
02:13:45 AM,Sunday 6 June 2004
{a grin like you wouldn't believe}
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01:19:46 AM,Sunday 6 June 2004
Alexander Hamilton
Threw twelve pots and enameled ten.
In lieu of glazing an eleventh pot,
He got shot.
Eleanor of Aquitaine
Was once with a lackwit ta'en.
He was flabby and wore flashes on his socks.
But hung like an ox.
Benjamin Disraeli
Excelled upon the ukulele.
His peroratory carried with it something of Scheherazade's tone.
Sucks to Gladstone.
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(3)
07:14:38 PM,Saturday 5 June 2004
THAT WAS SOOO GOOD.
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06:06:19 PM,Saturday 5 June 2004
The point is that no one's going to hire me for any kind of real job at a distance. Drano got hired that way, but that's 'cause he's a brilliant boy in a demanding, specialized, and technical field at which he had several years' experience; they actually flew him out to interview. No chance that'll happen for me. I simply don't have any skills that a thousand other champing employables don't, and they're already in the city. Why on earth should anyone give me the time of day if they can't even meet me face to face? I'm still holding out for home care jobs (and there's one that looks promising, if a bit daunting... it'd mean I'd have to stay in an apartment, 24 hours a day, for four or five days a week), because those have the important element of personal chemistry to consider, aside from bare qualifications, and it's something that a person can at least get an idea of via phone, email, and obsessive googling. But if I even have a hope of getting my own place for once in my life, I've got to get a job that can pay for it (and my student loans, and a jar of marmite now and then...), and I can't hope to get one unless I'm actually there. Of course it's plenty possible that, at the end of two months of frantic searching, when all my money's run out, I still won't have found a job -- and what then? Well. I'll figure it out. There's always something. I won't starve. I'm prepared for plenty extremities, some of them less pleasant than others, but all of them ultimately workable. I'll do what it takes. But I can't do much from way out here. Just gotta plunge.
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(5)
11:47:05 PM,Friday 4 June 2004
