Time Travel Made Easy

In the interest of not losing the ability to count the number of times I have been literally blinded by rage on one hand, I am going to swear off watching televised news programs for...eh, lets give it until the end of the year, I think. Not that I watch the news terribly often anyway; when I need to partake of mainstream media news sources, I go to nytimes.com, and even that doesn't happen with great frequency.

( classes classes other stuff classes )

Hey, remember when I used to post here? ...or anywhere that wasn't Twitter? ...yeah. M-me neither.

I'm probably going to offer a pair or two of earrings for auction on help_pakistan eventually, once I dig out a camera to photograph some of my newer stuff. I finally bought some silver wire, and it's been a bit nerve wracking to work with (expensive!) but good; it's very very different from the copper and bronze I've been using, and I like that. I also have some antiqued, dead soft bronze to play with. It'll be fun for more steampunky stuff, but I'm still fond of the color of my full hard industrial bronze, and I like the way it looks as it develops a natural tarnish.

I have a bag full of polymer clay that I still need to do something with; it's also nearly crocheting season again, and I've afghans to finish. I am not going to start putting together bootleg silkscreen apparatuses, no matter how much I want an AssCreed t-shirt. I'd never wear it, and I'd inevitably make a mess with the paint.

Been watching True Blood, and I'll probably have some thoughts to put together about it eventually; ditto Royal Pains and White Collar, although I've been more of a casual "brain in the off position" TV watcher this summer than an analytical one. I'd been planning to watch Warehouse 13, but S2E1 left a terrible taste in the back of my mind; I do adore a well done female villain, but I take a very real and very personal offense at the "angry feminist" trope.

( blathering and minutiae; school stuff, mostly )

I love it when I figure out what the thesis of my paper is...three hours before it's due. *eternal facepalm* (I wasn't writing about gender relations or the urban vs. agrarian divide! I was writing about class mobility.) The last half went much faster than the first.

This is not the worse paper writing experience of my sad and sordid paper writing career, however. That title goes to my English 220 research paper on Evelina, in which I flashbacked to eleventh grade and used the word "liminal" too much, got distracted by articles on gynosodomy in post-Rennaissance literature, got no sleep, and finished the paper just in time to run it all the way across campus to the department office, thirty seconds after my professor walked out of the building and towards her car with a stack of already-submitted papers in her arms. I chased her down in order to hand that thing in on time. 5 PM on a Friday in November, and I'd missed a chance to go to NYC to see Spamalot with the original cast. Afterwards I went to a D&D session, punched a wall hard enough to bruise my knuckles, and broke down crying uncontrollably for the first time in my life after someone made a joke about Narnia and one of the English professors.

It was a really funny joke, in context. I got an A on the paper. (My best paper writing experience was, hands down, my Literary Criticism final, senior year- I wrote it in less than twelve hours on half an hour of sleep, it was actually pretty good, and writing it was a joyous experience.)

So, really, this doesn't even rank in the top five for horrible paper experiences- but it was one of the most difficult to actually write. Part of that was probably due to not knowing what, precisely, I was writing about, and to my general apathy towards the book I read. More of it is probably to do with the way this class in general causes me a lot of general D: feelings.

Man. Now I really want to read about gynosodomy again- because really, who doesn't? But all I have is this book of articles on homoeroticism in ancient Arabian poetry, which isn't the same thing at all. *siiiigh*

jaskdf;jlk hnnrgghgh my Arab Politics and Society class is taught by a poli-sci grad student- Indiana U, class of '07, which makes him my age- and that's kind of seriously weird for me, especially because he is every stereotype of a successful MUN student ever. This means he's a fantastic public speaker, though, so I'm going to tentatively file that in the "pro" column.

The main reason for the keyboard smashing, though, is the paper assignment for the class- take any work of Arabic literature in translation, and analyze it through a political and sociological lens. *faps* It was a happy keyboard smash. Once again, I'm going to have a lot of overlap in my classes- Gender and Sexuality is going to be covering a lot of the later material in this class. I am extraordinarily pleased with my classes so far. Just one big ^____^ face all the time, seriously.

And now I have to run to Persian, where it will be readily apparent that I did no studying over the break. *sigh* Oops.