Yoinked from gileonnen, as it seemed to be a good idea.

You know how sometimes people on your friends list post about stuff going on in their lives, and all of a sudden you think "Wait a minute! Since when were they working THERE? Since when were they dating THAT PERSON? Since when?" And then you wonder how you could have missed all that seemingly pretty standard information, but somehow you feel too ashamed to ask for clarification because it seems like info you should already know? It happens to all of us sometimes.

If you like, copy the topics below, erase my answers and put yours in their place, and then post it in your journal! [Or don't, or post in comments, as you like.] Please elaborate on the questions that would benefit from elaboration. One-word answers seldom help anyone out.

( Vital info )

On a much less ego-driven note... idiocy like this makes me so frickin' angry. What is wrong with people?

Despite a rocky start, this day turned out pretty well.

Things that delight me:

1. I am having so much fun reviewing the canon for my Yuletide assignment. With luck, this will translate into a story that makes the recipient happy; in the meantime, I am selfishly enjoying it for myself. Glee.

2. notfromnimh will be home tomorrow!

3. I'm reading The House That George Built, and it's totally fascinating. The author's writing style is very fluid and easy to read, and I'm learning all sorts of things I didn't know about the early years of American songwriting in the 20th century. I don't think he's very fair to Oscar Hammerstein in spots, but to be fair to him, he's not writing about lyricists as such, but rather as they relate to the composers with whom they collaborated. And I totally wish I could meet George Gershwin somehow.

4. Radiolab. The new episode, and generally.

5. It's almost the weekend, which is always delightful. And Thanksgiving is in a week, also delightful, for a number of reasons.

6. My car is back from the shop, in working order! Huzzah.

7. A variety of videos! (Mostly musical in nature.)

( Behind the cut! )

8. And... not so much delight, but on reflection, I thought "The Waters of Mars" was good. Disturbing, but good. I'll be excited to see how the Christmas special plays out.

The moment the Prisoner remake jumped the shark for me? 6 (Jim Caviezel) histrionically screaming "YOU DID THIIIIIIIS!" outside 2's home, while 2 (Ian McKellan) theatrically eats a cherry cake. I don't know if this description can do justice to the supreme ridiculousness of this scene. Oh, lord.

And for some reason, the DVR didn't record V tonight. Grr.

But... at least the new Doctor Who special is about. *sigh*

LOCKE. FUCKING. LAMORA.

I can't even post a coherent review now. Just...just... auuuuugh.

(In a good way.)

Riddle me this, oh readers mine. Given the choice, with the caveat that both choices would theoretically pay equally well, would you rather...

a) do something you hate (whatever is most heinous to you - sanitation work, watching small children, being a cubicle monkey, etc.) for eight hours every day, with the certainty of being continually busy,

OR

b) be paid to do absolutely nothing for eight hours every day, but to be unable to do anything to effectively pass the time.

Discuss!



(The weekend was mostly good. A bit of car trauma, but... I'm good. Hopefully the car will be. And Halloween was a lot of fun.)

notfromnimh: OMG
notfromnimh: I just
notfromnimh: I just realized...
notfromnimh: I can make my T-Rex do the time warp and fit the project requirements.
skaryma: That's... kind of one of the most awesome sentences I've ever read.

1. Last night, I dreamed that I was working for Charm City Cakes, which was kind of amazing. We also somehow took a road trip to France. Please don't ask how this worked. It was an awesome dream.

2. I've had this stupid cold for a week now, and it won't go away. I've been much sicker before, but this is just lingering and sapping my will to do much of anything. Ugh. (Aggravated by the fact we've been crazy busy at work, I'm certain.) Sorry for being semi MIA several places.

3. The Heartland Film Festival starts this weekend. Hopefully I will feel well enough to go to several of the films. *fingers crossed*

4. They keep playing Journey's "Separate Ways" on the radio at work, and this is all I can picture:



Which is mostly good, as I can always use private amusement to get through the day.

5. I was happy to see ceilingtile, if ever so briefly! Hopefully we'll connect a little longer before too long, but I gave her Steak 'n Shake and the Indianapolis Central Library... so not a total loss, I hope.

6. My books are making me so happy right now. I'm re-reading Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate, and listening to the audiobook of The Lies of Locke Lamora. The reader is pretty hyper-dramatic, but the story is wonderful.

That's about it.

Nightmare Fuel:



Enjoy never sleeping again.

The minor character meme: Give me one or more of my characters and one minor character in their lives (i.e. their mother, their father, their first crush, their crazy neighbor lady, etc. etc.), and I'll tell you 5 facts about them AND who I'd use as a PB for said minor character.

( This is a list of the active ones; if you want to ask about an older one you know of, go ahead. )

I got a haircut today! It was very exciting. That's all.

So! I finished reading John Green's Paper Towns this weekend, and I liked it a lot. A lot more than the first third led me to think I might, in fact, and that's because it's a fairly thorough YA deconstruction of the Magical Rainbow Girl phenomenon (or what TV Tropes calls the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Now don't get me wrong; I can love a MPDG as much as the next person... if the author allows for her to be a real person, on some level. (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: absolutely. Garden State: not so much.) (500) Days of Summer, though it had a lot I liked about it, irked me a little as it felt like the filmmaker, via Joseph Gorden Levitt's character, blamed Zooey Deschanel's Summer for being a real and fallible person beneath the MPDG exterior. Sorry, brooding, lonely men-children; a girl is not a monster for not idolizing you the way you idolize her. (I really like the plural "men-children," by the way.) Still, it's a common trope, and so when relatively straightlaced Quentin is dragged out of his window in the middle of the night for crazy, madcap adventures by a girl he's loved since he was nine, I sat back, ready for her to shake up his world until they realize they are perfect for each other, yay.

I underestimated John Green, it turns out. I don't want to spoil the book for you, as you should read it, but it turns out to be about a lot more than Quentin's relationship (or lack thereof) with Margo. One thing Green really gets right is high school, both in its social dynamics and its psychology. So much so that parts of the book gave me the uncomfortable feeling I was back there. As I read it, I was picturing the halls of my high school, and even given the slight time gap, these kids talked like I remember high schoolers talking. He's actually a little weaker with true adults; both Q's parents and Margo's feel slightly caricatured at times. But the book has a momentum that propels it past any of its small flaws.

And it made me put a finger on something that's been bothering me about Cory Doctrow's Little Brother, which I've been reading via DailyLit. Not to pick on it; it's not a bad book. But something about Marcus, the main character, has been bugging me for awhile. And I think it's that Doctrow set up Marcus and friends as a foursome. Not just four kids who hang out together, but actual friends. The way Ben and Radar are Q's friends in Paper Towns. But (and I haven't finished the novel yet, so take with a grain of salt) the difference is that not only has Doctrow separated Marcus from his friends, I seem to care more than Marcus does. Yeah, there's a little bit of angst, but he's distracted by his perfect, hot, nerdy, brave girlfriend who wants to have sex as much or more than he does. Ange (the girlfriend) has rubbed me the wrong way from the minute she showed up, and if Doctrow doesn't validate that feeling before the end of the book, I will be angry, because... well. What's satisfying with Quentin is that his search for Margo ultimately brings him closer to his friends (even making him a new one), whereas Marcus not only loses them, but is too busy with his cyberheroics and sexing up his girlfriend to notice. I grant you, the stakes in Little Brother are objectively higher. But I think one of the problems I have with the MPDG phenomenon is that it perpetrates the myth that one person can be everything another person needs. That if you're in a romantic relationship with the right person, you don't need friends or outside relationships, because that person is everything to you. And it's not only incorrect, it's dangerous to think that way. Mundanely, because you are certain to be disappointed. And in extreme cases, because it can lead people (of all genders) to accept emotional abuse because they think "that's how it's supposed to be."

To sum up, after this long digression, Paper Towns is imperfect but enjoyable and thought-provoking. Definitely recommended. (And check out John Green's youtube project with his brother Hank, if you haven't already - vlogbrothers always entertains me.)

Sundry cool things encountered recently on the Internet:

1.) I'm about halfway through "season two" of Is It a Good Idea to Microwave This? on youtube. Much like Will It Blend?, they're basically videos of guys destroying stuff. Only instead of a kindly old gentleman with retro music, an industrial blender, and a budget, these are two college guys with a crappy little Sharp microwave and tinfoil. It's a total waste of time, yet I cannot look away.



2.) Dresden Codak tackles caveman science fiction.

3.) If the price weren't so steep, I would totally get one of these. Ah, Etsy, forever tempting me with things I cannot or should not have.

4.) I may have linked it before, but this dramatic reading of a breakup letter never fails to crack me up.

5.) I've always liked Luke Chueh's art, but I was delighted to see he's done a series of paintings inspired by Dante's Inferno. Adorably disturbing!

6.) A thought provoking comic of sorts raising awareness about schizophrenia and discrimination against those struggling with mental illness. Well done, and therefore a little upsetting.

7.) Despite the awkward formatting of the page, these horrible engagement photos are worth a schadenfreude-filled look.

Why am I so bad at casual social things? Arrrgh.

Also, why did I have "Gee, Officer Krupke" stuck in my head all afternoon?

Finally, why is O. Henry so brilliant?

ETA:...additionally, why did I just have a dream where I alternatingly Jack Bauer and pregnant? (I was never both at once, but I was always mysteriously the same character.)

So! It's been awhile since I've posted a cooking entry, but I got inspired last night to try the recipe that someone sent me for Oreo balls. (Whoever it was - thank you! I forget where it came from, as it was just in my "to do" bin of internet links.) I highly recommend them - they're pretty easy, really, and they taste fantastic. Sort of like the love child of a brownie and dirt cake.


( As you'll see, I was working with very limited counter space. )

ETA: It seems liberlucendus is to thank for my delicious shenanigans!

...for less than a half hour more, really, but.

I had a lovely weekend. nuetiquem_erro was in town, and it was great to see him. notfromnimh and I saw 9, which was brilliant and disturbing, and now she's back at school. And I got to sleep in Monday, as this week was my first of working the evening shift (which should be semi-permanent, for those of you interested to know).

And now... photospam from the prior weekend, when notfromnimh, my mother and I went the Blueberry Festival in Plymouth.

( The snozberries taste like snozberries! )

Tim Kang of The Mentalist



is totally the guy from the Shell Gasoline promotions that's always staring at you with such chipper confidence while you pump your gas. Hah!


...no one else cares, do they? Oops.


And on that note, I need to do some things and stop procrastinating them. I just feel like I'm emotionally hungover from the weekend. Ah well. Four day work week, at least. Happy fake Monday, everyone.

I don't know why this excites me so much. I don't know. I'm feeling optimistic, if cautiously so, these days. Probably because, among other things, it is looking more and more certain that I'm moving back to New York come January. It's a big step in the direction of how I want my life to go. And yaoqing will be home by Thanksgiving, which makes everything massively better. So now I just have to get certified so I can get a job similar to my current one in NYC, or if not, at least have that option to fall back on. And I should probably write Joe, to sort out this whole grad school thing. But for now... I'm happy with the direction things are headed.

Things I'm learning at my new job:

1. You cycle through the same 12-15 pieces of information about yourself with all your coworkers. This suggests that, if they gossip about you when you aren't there, said gossip doesn't include any of this information.

2. On the other hand, people who work in other departments, whose faces you don't even recognize, will unnervingly greet you by name.

3. Being the youngest person by a fair margin aggravates the insecurity of the training period.

4. Standing all day takes some getting used to, but is offset by being constantly busy, which makes the day go quickly.

5. Accidentally stabbing a needle through your glove and under your thumbnail hurts like a bitch. On the bright side, the only thing in the syringe at the time was antibiotics, so even if I got a little of the drug, it's no biggie. But... ow.

6. Every single person who teaches you to do something will teach you to do it a slightly different way.

But it's good. My coworkers are pleasant to be around, and I'm picking things up okay given that I've had no background in anything remotely like this job. Go figure. My boss, at least, likes that I'm inexperienced because I apparently don't have any bad habits for him to try and break.

And I leave you with another literalized music video. This time it's "Read My Mind" by The Killers. Not quite as good as "Total Eclipse of the Heart," but still fun.

So, so good. Augh.

Also, Marian/Walter/Laura is perhaps my first OT3.

God, I'm such a nerd. I may or may not write a coherent review later.

- I think I must have been clenching my jaw this week. It randomly hurts now, especially when I move it.

- Despite this evidence, the new job has been going reasonably well. It is good for my OCDish tendencies - lots of labelling and color coding and checklists. Not intensely difficult, though there's that new-job freshmany feeling nonetheless. Still, my coworkers are mostly very friendly, and I think I'll find a rhythm here eventually.

- I continue to adore Radiolab. Observe:



- Reading Alice Siebold's The Lovely Bones, which illustrates everything that can be good about modern "literary" fiction. It's a little pretentious here and there, but mostly it's just very character-driven and absorbing. Also still adoring The Woman in White, as I'm finally nearing the end of it.

- I'm going to relax this weekend; it's been a good few weeks, but between Kentucky, housesitting, and notfromnimh's boyfriend visiting, I haven't had my own proper space for awhile, and I need to unwind. See possible jaw-clenching above. (Plus, I need to finish season six of Buffy before it's due at the library.)

(Oh, and for those of you wondering? The two unguessed quotes in the last entry were, in order "I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse," and "May the Force be with you." No, I don't know how number 2 got that far off either.)

I went to www.translationparty.com and entered some movie/tv/books quotes into it. It translates them into Japanese and back again. Now you have to guess what they were originally!

(For your reference, all of mine are movie quotes, from reasonably famous movies. I promise.)

1. I'm not going to deny him in order to provide for him.
2. October 5 power, to please.
3. We have failed to communicate. "What we have here is a failure to communicate," guessed by snowyofthenight
4. I tried to test the census taker. Bean Fava, ate his liver with chianti witty. "A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver, with some Fava beans and a nice chianti," guessed by minviendha
5. Please play Sam. Terms. "Play it, Sam. Play 'As Time Goes By,'" guessed by minviendha
6. I will need a big boat. "We're gonna need a bigger boat," guessed by snowyofthenight
7. Crying in Baseball! "There's no crying in baseball!", guessed by snowyofthenight
8. My sister and fight in here! This is the War Room! "Gentlemen! You can't fight in here! This is the War Room!", guessed by minviendha
9. Cinderella story. Let's leave it anywhere. Former Masters champion greenskeeper. "Cinderella story. Outta nowhere. A former greenskeeper, now, about to become the Masters champion," guessed by thysalyx
10. I will be damned dirty ape foot wrong. "Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape," guessed by thysalyx

So I got my last paycheck from Borders today. So that's all done, yay. notfromnimh turned 21 yesterday, which was pleasant, if uneventful. We went to see Ponyo and had dinner ("we" including her boyfriend, who's in town this week to visit).

As I've nothing more exciting to report right now... a meme! From minviendha. You likely know the drill at this point; pick 10 characters from various fandoms, don't look at the questions until you've picked and numbered the ten.

1. Michael Carpenter (Dresden Files)
2. Juilet Burke (Lost)
3. Iroh (Avatar)
4. Karl "Helo" Agathon (BSG)
5. Michael Weston (Burn Notice)
6. Alanna of Trebond (Song of the Lioness Quartet)
7. Zoë Washburn (Firefly)
8. Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon)
9. Arabella Strange (Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell)
10. Martha Jones (Doctor Who)

( Questions Ahoy )

Because I meant to write more, and yet it's getting away from me.

1. No more Borders! My last day was Friday. In my last week, I managed to set pretty much everything in order, deliver most of the outstanding books I had waiting to go, sell none of the key items I was supposed to while on the book floor, and fangirl Tim Grimm silently because he didn't look like he was in the mood for me to express I knew who he was and that I loved his work. Hopefully he had a better day after I saw him, that's all I'm saying. (...no, I don't expect most of you to know who Tim Grimm is, because he's pretty local, but I was still excited. He's an actor/songwriter, if you wondered.) Anyway, leaving was a little bittersweet, as I will definitely miss quite a few of my coworkers, but I'm excited to be out of retail and the mess that is corporate bookselling at present.

2. I've been housesitting this week, which has been nice. Their dog is very odd, but mostly well behaved, and I've enjoyed having my own space, even if it really isn't mine. Not cooking as much as I'd have liked, but I am watching a lot of 90s X-Men cartoons, so there's that.

3. My sister came over the other night to hang out and watch Buffy, and we were listening to the most recent Radiolab podcast. They make reference to the end of King Lear, which led to me summarizing the plot of the play for her, as she's never seen or read it. In hindsight, I wish I had recorded it, because apparently my sister found the whole thing kind of hilarious.

4. We saw a preview of Julie and Julia the next night, and I enjoyed it. Not a great movie, maybe, but the 2002/Amy Adams portion had the charm, if not the wit, of a Neil Simon comedy, and Stanley Tucci and Meryl Streep were delightful as Paul and Julia Child. I agree with most of what the New York Times reviewer had to say, though I think the modern half of the movie wouldn't have been so bad if it had been a stand alone film. A worse film than the Julia Child one, maybe, but not horrible. Still, for its faults, it's worth seeing.

5. I saw the Decemberists on Saturday. It was fantastic and delightful, and I really have very little more to say because I'm still squeeing in delight and fantasticness.

6. New job starts late this week. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

7. New podcast, finally, after months of technical difficulties. Download it here. No theme this time, just some songs I'm into right now of various genres. Enjoy.

1. Back from vacation, pretty relaxed as a result. It was great to see everyone, especially David (as I see him so seldom these days, what with his living across the country and all). I unsuccessfully attempted to waterski, successfully got a small sunburn (though it's healed now), and generally had a nice time.

2. So... last week at Borders this week. Two years later, the "temporary" job is ending. I feel it's kind of a lateral move from one job that wasn't what I wanted to do with the rest of my life to another; on the plus side, substantially more salaray and no retail holiday season, so yay for that. I'm about to become a member of the healthcare industry. Go me!

3. Decemberists on Saturday. I am massively excited.

4. Things with the family are a little weird at present, but nothing dire at this point. Still... I'm glad I'll be housesitting for a bit. I'll be happy to have some space.

You have now been updated on all things Amy. Congratulations.

I laughed until I cried. This probably says more about me than the clip.



Ah well.

Also, for those of you to whom this pertains, I will be gone for about a week starting tomorrow evening. Don't burn down the internet while I'm gone.