Let's Go Bother Snape. Bother Bother Bother!

1) During seminar class discussions, when people - and it's ALWAYS female people - begin their sentences with something along the lines of "This is probably completely wrong, but..." or "This might not make any sense, but..."  Jesus HMS Christ.  Show a little confidence in yourselves.  Since you're bringing it up in the first place, clearly you DON'T think it's completely wrong, and guess what?  It's probably not.  I don't know who decided that it's good classroom etiquette to apologize for your thoughts, but (s)he should be beaten to death with sticks.

COROLLARY: During rehearsals, when people apologize for dropping a line, forgetting blocking, or breaking character.  By assuming the embarrassed face and apologizing, you have used up several seconds that you could have been using getting it right.  Again, it's ALWAYS women who do this.  Stop apologizing for your work and start projecting some faith in yourselves.

2) When people sit in the back of a class THEY SIGNED UP FOR and do nothing but bitch about it.  The worst offenders of this lately have been the girls in my class on reading theatre, which focuses on grotesque plays.  The other day, before the professor came in, they decided to talk loudly about how the class made them nauseous and they couldn't fathom what kind of sicko would actually want to study this.  (For the record, this class covers everything I love.)  If you can't handle the grotesque, then WHY, pray tell, did you sign up for a class subtitled ACTING GROTESQUE???  Nobody drafted you for the damn thing.  I wasn't the biggest fan of stats, but I didn't see the need to denigrate the subject to anyone who would or would not listen.
For the record, I am drowning in Old Norse right now, a class with which I have a loving but abusive relationship.  Real post to come soon, hopefully.

This morning, I took over Josh's kitchen.  AND WE MADE BAGELS.

IT WAS AWESOME.

Then I sat through a five-hour meeting, which was less awesome.

But there were bagels, and that is what was important.

Now I need to crash, because I'm functioning on four hours of sleep.

 What does it mean when your professor comes into class wearing a gremlin mask?  And proceeds to leave it on all throughout her lecture?

I love college so freaking much.

 To steal an expression coined by Jake: Holy hyena farts, is it ever good to be back!  People have been slowly trickling into section since Saturday, and it's been so great to see everybody.  It's too early for any drama or other stupidity to have befallen us; everybody's just so happy to see each other.

My drive down was treacherous.  Between the ice and snow, and the potholes that litter that stretch of I-64, my car took quite a beating; it was covered in salt by the time I finally got to Duke, and I spent about an hour last night brushing off the top layer.  But I am here, and that is what matters.

Last night was so much fun!  We cracked out Amanda K's copy of Just Dance (you could really get in shape playing this game), played some Bang! and some Modern Warfare, and went nuts in the hallway celebrating our final full day of freedom.  Late at night, I went to Tina's room and we girl-talked for a couple hours.  And rush starts tomorrow!  Yay rush!  Rush rush rush rush rush...I am absolutely wearing a coat and tie to the open house.

Also, someone unplugged my and Liz's fridge after we left.  And left the door closed.  It was, judging from the appearance and smell, a Biohazard Level 3 until we finally braved it and cleaned it out about fifteen minutes ago.

Only a couple people missing now.  And I can't wait for them to get here.

Tomorrow I plan to go visit the Rare Book Room and take my first crack at my next manuscript.  It'll be good to get back to being productive.  I also have some reading that I should get done for tomorrow, before class actually starts.

Now back to squandering my final day of freedom!

Happy New Year, and thanks to Nick, Emy, Colton, Dylan, Mary, Dee, Matt, and anyone I left out for making the last couple hours of 2009 special.  You kids are all so awesome.  There's no better way to celebrate than with a combination of some of your oldest and newest friends.

I have made six skeins of silk-alpaca yarn since going on break.  Three of them became a purse, which I needed badly.  I don't know what the others are going to become.  I'd like to have a nice dress shawl so I can look pretty and be warm when I'm doing something fancy, but that's going to take more than three skeins.  Also, my fibercraft projects tend to go on major hiatuses when I'm actually in school, so it has to be something I can get done before January 13.

I LOVE BIG DOGS.  Josh's uncle has an adorable big dog.  Screw this cat business a thousand times over, everyone should have dogs.

I'm excited to get back to school.  I'm excited to start rush, excited about my classes, and way too excited about starting actual research.

Job-hunting for the summer is frustrating, as job-hunting always is.  I have a few things lined up as potentials, but they all have costs and benefits, and if I'm going to work in Durham, I need to be able to afford some amount of rent money for whomever I end up staying with.  Also, I want to be able to really start saving, but summer work in the theater just doesn't pay all that much.  I may end up taking on a second job to supplement it (no tables, please).

I still have not seen Avatar, and can't decide whether I want to.  I finally found someone who agreed with me, though, that 2012 was the best piece of bad entertainment to come out in years.

Now I kind of feel like I'm rambling, and I have bourbon balls to make.

The last couple days of the semester were good ones.  I spent quality time with several individuals, played large amounts of the new Super Mario Brothers Wii game, went to a fabulous karaoke party (and subsequently lost my voice) with Josh and several of his friends, and, oh, yeah, turned in that plague of an Italian paper.

Phase I of the Middlesworth project is complete.  Now I just have to motivate myself to edit it, and then perhaps I can get money.

And speaking of money and medieval goodness...

Tina sent me a link to a program for undergrads called the Deans' Summer Fellowship.  Basically, if you can come up with a question you'd like to answer badly enough, Duke will give you the money to answer it.

What I'd like to do, and what I plan to do if they give me the chance, is go to the British Library in London and do a transcription of Cotton Vespasian D.viii, aka The Manuscript That Contains the N-Town Plays (the Coolest of the Four Corpus Christi Mystery Cycles).  Then, I want to go back to Durham, arm myself with some dictionaries and coffee, and translate the whole thing as a performance text, complete with original stage directions and notes.  This will hopefully bring us closer to answering two questions: "How did the non-guild-funded N-Town plays function as a dramatic spectacle?" and "Is medieval pageantry hardcore, or what?"

I am excited about this prospect to the point of an accelerated heart rate.  Someday, I want a university to pay me to be a medievalist.

I'd still like to work in theatres and do freelance dramaturgy.  But I'm quickly discovering that translating manuscripts (especially performance manuscripts) is, academically, the one thing I truly love.

It's good to have a dream.

And one more thing... Dearest, darling members of Congress: stop taking bribes and do your goddamned jobs.  We trusted you people to reform our health care system.  You're not reforming health care; you're buying off Ben Nelson and Mary Landrieu with ridiculous pork-barrel deals so you can take credit for reforming health care.  And this applies to all of you, on all sides of the aisle, because the Republicans are only trying to stop this because they don't want Democrats to gain political points out of it.  And in all of this, no one will actually read the bill they're voting on, the same way they didn't read the Patriot Act before shoving it down all our throats. I realize that I am making some blanket generalizations, and my feeling is that if God had not wanted us to make blanket generalizations, he would not have made so many of us so similar.

That was a crappy note on which to end that post.  I'll fix that.  YAY RUSH IN LESS THAN A MONTH!

The Dreaded Old English Translation Final:
It was a breeze. My professor said to expect it to take an hour and a half; I finished it in 20 minutes, five of which were spent identifying the passages and five of which were spent making my translations pretty. I almost felt let down, but had I not spent the past three days studying obsessively for it, reading about Saint Audrey and Saint AElfeah and Cynewulf and Cyneheard and a bunch of other people I'd never heard of, it wouldn't have been anywhere near that easy. Cool how that works out.

Psi Upsilon:
As dearly as I love my brothers, I think we've all been getting on each others' nerves a bit. Tensions in section were running high last month, especially in light of some fairly major decisions we had to make (with regards to housing, potential new members, etc.). Fortunately, that storm seems to have passed, and things largely seem to be okay again - we can all talk, laugh, and make fun of each other again. Even though it'll be nice to be home, it's going to be tough not to see them for a month when I've gotten so used to seeing them every day. I'm excited about rush; we've got some good PNM's, and I'm eager to get to know them better.

Italian Paper:
*rip out hair*
*whine*
*drown sorrows in Italian horror movies*
*remember that paper is ABOUT Italian horror movies*
*repeat cycle*

Next Semester's Schedule:
No class on Fridays. HELL YES. That is all.

Romantic Life:
Things with Josh are awesome and fun. I like where I am right now. If you really want the details, shoot me an email or IM.

Jobs:
Manbites Dog, Actors, and DPAC all have internship potential. For actual paying work, I'm hoping to get a grunt gig at the American Dance Festival, running lights or being a flyer or something fun like that. I want to stay in Durham over the summer if possible so that I can take classes and be close to my manuscripts. Which brings me to...

Geekery:
I'll be starting work on the leaves we have of Cotton Nero D.ii when I get back in the spring. I'm not actually that interested in the annals of the Battle Abbey, but it's supposed to be good for translation practice. Once that's finished, I'm going to take a look at Cotton Vespasian D.viii, which contains the Middle English text of the N-Town plays. I'd like to do, either as an independent study or as a project for the class, a translation of the N-Town pageants with a focus on spectacle. It's really a shame that their performance aspect gets buried under the religion, and that the only thing they're ever used for anymore is to retell Bible stories, when particularly the pageants from the apocrypha have the potential to be much more than that.

And I will shut up about that now, because even though I could prattle about it forever, I realize that no one but my advisor actually wants to listen to me do this.

So that's my life right now. It beats me hard sometimes, but I'm good with it, generally.

I woke up this morning feeling like I slept on a bed made of gravel. My shoulders, back, and legs have been aching all day.

And since then, except for some brief food breaks, my entire day has consisted of realizing just how much I depend on my dictionary for Old English. I put the dictionary away and tried to translate a short passage from Blickling. The damn thing may as well have been written in Korean for all I could do with it.

So I've been working on losing that crutch. It's taking a while.

On the bright side, it's the only final I have, so I can devote virtually unlimited time to it. The downside being, of course, that it is my only final, so I feel like I should devote virtually unlimited time to it.

Oh well. All will be better on Tuesday. And when I turn in the Italian paper on Saturday, the semester will be over. Yay!

All things considered, it's been a damn good one.

In about ten years, I'm going to visit Louisville and discover that the city I grew up in no longer exists, because it's buried in a thick layer of subsidized modern art. The whores city planners keep building shit in the streets. I was driving in the downtown area, and discovered a giant sculpture made of rusty bikes planted smack in the middle of the sidewalk on 4th Street that was definitely not there this summer. Come on, city planners - I'm all for more culture in the city, but people have to walk on that sidewalk. Give that money to Actors Theatre or the Orchestra.

There's also some construction happening on a section of Eastern Parkway that makes it damn near impossible to get to the southern half of 3rd Street. That was ultra-annoying, and nobody seems to know what they're building.

That said, I had a really great Thanksgiving break. Had a tasty dinner and lots of quality time with my family, particularly my mom. I was afraid that being in my room might be a little strange, because there are a lot of Corwyn-related memories associated with it, but it didn't bother me at all, which is a good sign. I also got to see Nick and Emy, which is always oodles of fun. I am glad they seem to be happy and doing well for themselves, though their house that they share with about 20 gay guys is downright unsettling. Not because of the gay guys. Because of the steampunk-looking sculptures all over the place...it's so them :D

The highlight, though, was getting to see Lydia. Partly because we've both been crazy-busy and partly because I suck, we've barely talked at all this semester. But we met up for lunch at Ramsi's (always good!) and aside from the massive amounts of catching up we needed to do, it was seriously like neither of us had been gone. Everything that made our friendship work still works - we don't judge each other, we can laugh at each other and with each other, we'll readily embarrass ourselves in front of each other, we'll smile together, cry together, always know exactly why the other is crying even if the other doesn't know it herself, and we can talk, just talk, for hours on end.

Everyone should be as blessed as I am to have one friend like Lydia. There are few people whom I admire and love as much.

And I just had some good conversation with some people I needed to talk to. That was cool too.

Now to wait for everyone else to get back.

Thanksgiving is just around the corner, to be followed shortly by that month with all the holidays in it. Before anything else happens, I want to make a couple of things perfectly clear:

-If someone wishes you a merry Christmas and you get offended, you are being a dipshit.
-If someone wishes you happy holidays and you get offended, you are being a dipshit.
-If someone expresses any kind of desire for your life to be pleasant in the near future and you get offended, you are being a dipshit. This includes "God bless you," but does not include "I will pray that you find Jesus soon."

Look. I don't care if it's the Great Epic Sneeze of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Just have fun on whatever the hell holiday you celebrate, mkay?

So please. If you want to get your panties in a wad because of your persecution complex, do it somewhere else. That is all.

There are about 27 more people in our hall than there normally are. This is due to an incoming by several Gamma Taus, brothers and pledges from our Georgia Tech chapter. I am currently in my room, taking a break from the excitement before tonight.

We have to decide, come Sunday, where we're going to live for the next three years - or, I guess, more specifically, if we want to reclaim our current section. I am not looking forward to this meeting. There is a small but vocal contingent of brothers that really wants us to pick a new section, and I really, really don't want to move.

Not just because we live in the nicest dorm on campus. Not just because I personally have never known a Chi Delta that wasn't in Keohane 4D. Not just because this section has huge rooms, wide hallways, plenty of hanging space, and an eventual manifest destiny. No, largely because this has become something of a pattern in my life - just as I am beginning to find stability in a place and think of it as home, I am uprooted and hauled off somewhere else, and the getting-used-to-it process begins all over again. Yes, I know that's a totally selfish reason for not wanting to move, but that's how I feel.

The Lower D's is going quite well! People should come see it. I would describe it more here, but I'm still trying to figure out for myself what this batshit-crazy play is about.

A bunch of us went to Chi Psi's party last night, which turned out to be a lot of fun. Did some dancing, had some good conversations. I discovered that I have much better tossing hair now that it's shorter - my long hair was really shitty for tossing. And we determined that Rihanna's "song" "(Please) Don't Stop the Music" suddenly becomes a lot more enjoyable when one of your GT brothers mishears the refrain as "Weasel Stompin' Music."

Oh yeah, my prospective schedule for next semester:

THEATREST 129S: Medieval Drama
ITALIAN 108: Italian Sociolinguistics
MEDREN 298S: Old Norse (yay for my first grad-level course!)
THEATREST 101S: Reading Theatre - Acting Grotesque
DANCE 69: Introduction to Jazz Dance (to keep me in relative shape and make me less clumsy)

DRAMATURGY PROJECTS: New Works Festival, The Miser
MANUSCRIPT RESEARCH: Exeter Riddles, Cotton Nero D.iii

And now they're about to go on a Cookout run without me, so I must flee.

Hey there, Vatican, Southern Baptist Convention, Church of Latter-day Saints and all your cronies,

Go to hell.

That's one option, anyway.

The other is that if you are going to insert yourselves into every area of public policy and try to dictate what other people can and can't do with each other or for each other, you need to FUCKING PAY TAXES.

Of course, the better option at this point would just be to go to hell.  I don't want to see projects for the public good funded with your dirty money.  Your establishments are giving a bad name to the good and well-intentioned people who identify with them, and are providing a stomping ground for sanctimonious blowhards who think the way they love (not very much, apparently) is the only valid way.

So yeah...just go to hell.

Way to fuck up, Maine residents.  Guess your little blue state bubble just got punctured a bit, didn't it?

Sometimes I feel like I'm so lucky to be a red state liberal, because I don't get complacent so easily.

But this is one of those times when something Paul Begala (I'm not his biggest fan, but he has his moments) said really rings true to me: "Never stop fighting.  Never stop believing.  And whatever you do, never stop thinking about tomorrow."  We can't afford to get down for too long; if we do, it means they've won.

However, for right now...something incredibly sad happened yesterday, and the only appropriate response is to mourn.

I seem to go through periods of constant LJing and periods of LJ death.  Just saying.

A couple of questions:

1) Why the hell does nothing in the physics department count as a QS?  Or at least, nothing below the not-a-chance-in-hell level of advancedness?  Maybe my memory is faulty, and admittedly my physics experience is pretty limited, but I seem to remember there being an awful lot of math involved.  It's not just the premeds that have to fill a math requirement, Duke.  It's looking more and more like I will have to take Compsci 4, and I really, really don't want to...but the other option is to take actual math.

They're not giving me a whole lot of room for creativity here.

2) Why does almost every single class I want to take occur in the MWF 2:50-4:05 time slot?
3) Why does the theatre studies major have so many required classes?  My advisor keeps telling me to take my requirements first so that I know I have room for them, but I don't know if or when some of these classes are going to be offered again, and I ABSOLUTELY MUST TAKE medieval drama before I lose the opportunity to do so.
4) Why does the Italian department hate me?

So yeah...decisions, decisions, decisions.  Do I take Intro to Acting and get it out of the way now, or do I take a class at the same time that sounds absolutely amazing and may not be offered again for a while?  Do I take a grad-level course in Old Norse that I know I will love, but may also potentially eat my life?  Do I take astronomy and fill an NS/STS requirement, while risking taking a semester off from Italian and losing my speaking skills entirely?  Does it matter that the Italian department is offering NOTHING that I want take this semester?

Grrrrr.  Will somebody please give me a nice, simple dilemma, like whether to take calculus or Chaucer?

And once again, I am up way the hell later than I should be.  That's the third or fourth day in a row now.

But I've been happy...happier than I can remember being in a while.

I'm doing research that I love.
I didn't completely tank my Italian test.
I love my fraternity, so much.
My non-Psi U friends are pretty awesome too.  I have a great team in the crew of The Lower D's.
Rush is starting soon!  I'm really excited about that.
A couple of huge weights have been lifted off my chest.
Let me reiterate that I didn't tank my Italian test.
Halloween is this weekend.

And something pretty awesome has been in the process of happening for a couple weeks now.  Something I've alluded to before here.  If you want the details, ask me later when I'm awake.

But yeah...it's amazing how good things can get when you make a conscious decision that your life is absolutely not going to go to hell/enter a state of inertia, especially not because of something someone else did.  Wallowing time is long gone.  It's time to live.

I had a really, really great week.  Just generally good, all around.

Now I have a cold :(

Also, the LSRC is WAY bigger than I had previously thought.

I'll just post the lyrics to a song.  Which is "Wild World," by Cat Stevens

Now that I've lost everything to you
You say you wanna start something new
And it's breakin' my heart you're leavin'
Baby, I'm grievin'
But if you wanna leave, take good care
Hope you have a lot of nice things to wear
But then a lot of nice things turn bad out there

Oh, baby, baby, it's a wild world
It's hard to get by just upon a smile
Oh, baby, baby, it's a wild world
and I'll always remember you like a child, girl

You know I've seen a lot of what the world can do
And it's breakin' my heart in two
Because I never wanna see you sad, girl
Don't be a bad girl
But if you wanna leave, take good care
Hope you make a lot of nice friends out there
But just remember there's a lot of bad and beware

Oh, baby, baby, it's a wild world
It's hard to get by just upon a smile
Oh, baby, baby, it's a wild world
and I'll always remember you like a child, girl

Baby, I love you
But if you wanna leave, take good care
Hope you make a lot of nice friends out there
But just remember there's a lot of bad and beware

Oh, baby, baby, it's a wild world
It's hard to get by just upon a smile
Oh, baby, baby, it's a wild world
and I'll always remember you like a child, girl

Obviously there's no girl...but other than the gender-bender, that about sums it up right now.  I'll be okay.

WHY ARE YOU REMAKING SUSPIRIA???

Seriously.  First The Wicker Man, then Cannibal Holocaust, and now Suspiria.  YOU CAN'T REMAKE SUSPIRIA.  My favorite films are like the kids in Cabin Fever, dying off slowly one by one.  What's next?  Are you going to remake fucking Salo?

It's not just that the original Suspiria (one of the scariest movies I've ever seen, with a soundtrack that made the TATTATP music sound like a lullaby, and which caused me to lie awake in fear that my roommate was going to come back from the dead and murder me with a jeweled knife, though I am fairly certain that my roommate is not, in fact, dead) cannot be improved by remaking it.  It's that you CAN'T REMAKE IT.  Without Argento's crazy sight-and-sound style, the plot itself becomes kind of stupid.  Without the blinding flashes of color and the Goblin soundtrack, the horrific scenes become run-of-the-mill.  In short, the only thing they can possibly do with the movie is take it and bastardize it.

Seriously, are you going to remake Salo next?  Would that be a good one to cash in on, Pasolini's bird-flip to the world?  Were the kids in the original not hot enough?

I don't think mainstream cinema is the devil, really, I don't.  But they're trying damn hard to make me think it.

1) The Mystic Burger Van Guy

The mystic burger van, technically called OnlyBurger, is a very sketchy-looking van that magically appears in certain spots on campus when the wind is blowing north.  Or possibly south.  Whatever...it shows up every so often.  The MBV sells some of the best burgers and fries I have ever had.  But that's not why it makes me happy.  That would be the guy who runs the MBV.  He is one of those unbelievably friendly people who remembers everyone's name after meeting them once, and will say hi to them if he sees them even if they aren't buying anything from him.  He also seems to take a lot of pride in what he does.  More people should be like that.

2) Awesome Fun Zombie Themed Parties That Go Really Well

Biohazard.  Nuff said.  It was awesome.  Check out www.duke.edu/psiu and scroll down a bit for more info.  And I got to show off my mad skillz at stage makeup  The stuff on Liz and Mike's faces?  That was me.

3) Dramaturgy

I am SO EXCITED about The Lower D's.  I'm in demand as a dramaturg.  I'm also in demand as an audio tech, but that's because nobody else wants to do it.  Okay, that's also the same reason I'm in demand as a dramaturg.  The difference being that audio is something I'm kind of meh about - I do it to get experience and money.  Whereas dramaturgy is something that I truly love and am truly invested in.  And there's the part where I get writing credit.  It's like doing research in a research group, only instead of doing research I'm writing.

4) Med/Ren

I get my paws on an untranslated Old English text later this year.  YES.

So yeah...everything is pretty damn peachy.  Oh, and I got a new Ren Faire skirt.

The last couple of days in Louisville before I went back to Duke were fun ones.  I said a tearful but warm goodbye to Corwyn (and I promise I am NOT going to start dwelling on that, not yet anyway), partied with some friends for the end of the summer, and had food from Ramsi's one more time.  But there were a few moments of these days, like those of last summer, that were quite emotional for me: when I saw the school buses making their rounds in the afternoon, and realized that I would indeed never be on one again, at least not for its traditional purpose.  And these were emotional moments indeed, and my emotions can be expressed as follows: HAHAHAHAHAHA YOU LITTLE DWEEBS!  YOU HAVE TO GO BACK TO HIGH SCHOOL AND I DON'T! *raspberry*

My Duke experience this year is already quite different from that of last year, with many new concepts introduced.

-Living In Section, on West, in Keohane, a dorm with Air Conditioning, and Washing Machines/Dryers That Work.  Needless to say, all items in bold make for very pleasant changes from dear old Bassett.

-Living In Section in General, which has thus far been a great experience, because there's always someone to talk to, get food with, play a game, or just enjoy company while doing homework/procrastinating

-No Marketplace Meal Plan, which means that I will not suddenly, halfway through the semester, have to ask my parents for even more money because I don't have time to go back to East, have no more food points, and still require food to stay alive

-Taking Classes That I Like, such as those involving Greek theatre and dead languages, and not those involving standard deviations

-Professor Beckwith, who I want to be when I grow up

-The Section Pogo Stick, on which I am currently, with 317 nonstop pogos, the reigning champion

-The Lower D's, the Duke Players mainstage show, which I am helping to write.  Yes.  I am ridiculously excited.

And now I really should go to class.  Because it's on East.  Sometimes I can't win.

You shall be preserved for eternity in an LJ icon!  Congrats!