A skittery, erratic attempt at a weblog. Rambles will be indulged and depths will be plumbed. Who knows what I'll come up with?
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| Fragments A skittery, erratic attempt at a weblog. Rambles will be indulged and depths will be plumbed. Who knows what I'll come up with? |
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Saturday, February 26, 2005 One Last Thing This is a neat quiz: Choose a band and answer only in song titles by that band: Barenaked Ladies Are you male or female? I'll Be That Girl Describe yourself: Falling For The First Time How do some people feel about you? Just A Toy How do you feel about yourself? What A Good [Girl] (is that cheating? maybe so, but it's like the next line of the song, so...) Describe your ex: It's Only Me (as in, that's what my current boyfriend can say about this question) Describe your current boyfriend: The King of Bedside Manor Describe what you want to be: Great Provider Describe your current mood: Crazy Describe your friends: Some Fantastic Share a few words of wisdom: Who Needs Sleep? posted by susan | 10:05 PM Weather: apparently it snowed while we were in New York. Listening to: Tori Amos, "Jamaica Inn" Taking a break from: science fiction essay, diabetes research Weeks and Weaknesses Hello there. New York is an overwhelming monstrosity of a city. It's impossible to know where to look. It will swallow you whole with horns, thousand-foot billboards, and flashing lights. If it were an ingestible substance, it would be quite, quite illegal. It is nothing short of 24-7 fabulousness. Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Gates in Central Park are, for lack of a stronger word, lovely. Everyone else thinks they're goofy, and they probably are. But I genuinely loved them. I'm not trying to be snotty and/or artsier-than-thou and/or intellectually superior. I'm not proposing that Christo and I are on the same saffron-coloured wavelength. But the installation is still a thing of beauty in my books (which probably makes most of my books joke books, but I'm sticking to it). Apparently I have some kind of weakness for modern and contemporary art. Yeah, okay, you COULD ask "Why on Earth would you want to put up 7500 orange shower-curtain-like things, or cover a teacup with fur?" But somehow I never do. Another weakness: Tori Amos. In honour of tomorrow's Academy Awards (which I may well not watch, having seen exactly one of the nominated films and an outside shot at best), here is a list of awards I think she should be awarded for her new CD The Beekeeper, and/or material thereon: The Aflac Award for Incongruous Product Placement, for the line "Driving in my Saab, on the way to Ireland..." from the song Ireland The Amos Memorial Bizarre Terminology Prize, for managing to use the term "motorbus" in a serious, non-ironic context. She's really good at this sort of thing, though, so I guess she's winning her own prize here. The Gaia Award, for the sweetest un-cheesy song about motherhood, Ribbons Undone. The 'Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da' Worst Song Of Career Award, for the song Hoochie Woman. (Ok, in the first place, I didn't know anyone ever used that phrase with a straight face...) The Webster's Prize for the song title most likely to have been cribbed together from words selected at random from the dictionary, for Martha's Foolish Ginger. The Disney Memorial Anthropomorphism Prize for the brazen atrribution of human characteristics to abstract concepts in the line "And I know/you will always love Sorrow/is that why you gave her dress to Happiness?/‘Cause it matches her eyes when she cries..." from the song General Joy The Xerox Award, for successfully creating a choir of little Toris to sing ethereal banshee backup on Jamaica Inn. One last weakness: I owe various people various things, including but not limited to e-mails, blog comments, link name changes, money, groceries, letters, visits, phone calls, photographs, and the return of various items on loan. I am working on it, I promise you. I love and cherish all who read this and many who don't, so if you haven't heard from me recently, it's not a personal slight, I promise. Just me popping off the face of the planet for a spell, again. ~SQ ETA: I momentarily forgot about the monstrosity that is "Pirates", from Y Kant Tori Read, when awarding the Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da Award. Maybe it and "Hoochie Woman" can tie. Or, alternatively, we can follow Tori's lead by not acknowledging Y Kant Tori Read as a legitimate part of her career. And...no one cares. I know. I know. Forgive me, I'm getting old and rambly. posted by susan | 6:29 PM Thursday, February 03, 2005 Weather: almost warm! 0 degrees, no wind. Listening to: k. d. lang, "Hallelujah" (Leonard Cohen cover) Taking a break from: systems and policy, theoretically. In practice I just got back from dinner and volunteering. Dream The weirdest thing happened this morning. It took me a long time to fall asleep last night, and when my alarm went off to get me up for my 8:30 ethics tutorial I decided I really wasn't interested in going. So I reset my alarm for my 10:30 class, but neglected to turn it back ON, with the result that I slept till 11:15. Ok, so that in and of itself isn't weird, at all. The weird bit is that, between 8ish and 11:15, I had a dream that I was -- no kidding -- IMPRESSED with. I was IN it, but it also felt as if I was watching a really great, weird, suspenseful, scary movie. It wasn't a nightmare, because the frighteningness was objective -- it wasn't keyed into fear centres or anything. It had a (at the time) plot, and was entertaining, interesting, dramatic and absorbing. It's a pity I don't have a full handle on it anymore, even though it's not like I could explain it properly anyway (or that it would be any of those things during the day). But when I woke up, I was very impressed with my subconscious mind. Apparently, locked somewhere deep down there, I DO have some pretty decent imagery. I really have no idea where any of it came from. And believe it or not, I would have been very sorry to miss it for the sake of class. It's possible I need some priority-straightening.... ~SQ posted by susan | 6:53 PM Wednesday, February 02, 2005 Weather: -4, apparently. To me, pleasantly crisp. Listening to: k. d. lang, "After The Gold Rush" (cover of Neil Young) Taking a break from: ministrations to a sick boyfriend, Systems & Policy assignment Eventoids -I get sick at stupid times. Well, in this case, it's not stupid in that it makes SENSE that I got sick -- my entire apartment got sick this past weekend with the exception of Tiffany, who escaped the plague in London. But this would have been a good week/weekend to get stuff done. Nevertheless, who knows how productive I would have been if I were well, anyway.... -Have I mentioned how much I love online shopping? Today I picked up three (3) packages from chapters.indigo.ca, that arrived at three (3) different times and were notified in my mailbox by three (3) separate "You have a package!" slips. I placed them as one order and avoided shipping charges, but apparently Indigo likes to screw ITSELF on shipping. What can I say. -So right now I'm listening to k. d. lang's "hymns of the 49th parallel" which is the first CD I've bought in several months. It possibly seems an odd choice for me, but that "Helpless" cover just gets in my head and stays (plus I think it's lovely). And although no one's cover of Joni Mitchell's A Case Of You will ever live up to the original that I adore (no, not even Tori's), this CD is very spare and haunting and quite appropriate to its subject matter. It'd be a good cottage-listening CD. Apparently I'm really just a good Canadian girl at heart. -A few words on bathroom stalls, here. Margaret Atwood says something in Lady Oracle about how bathroom stalls are the last places left on Earth for private reflection. As such I've always felt that they should be treated with a bare minimum of respect for this particular function, as well as their more obvious ones. So imagine my shock when, settling down in a cubicle in the first floor girl's washroom of the student centre, I am greeted with the grinning face of Derek K., one of the Student Union presidential hopefuls. Some female campaign volunteer (at least, I hope it was a female campaign volunteer) seems to have thought that plastering a campaign poster INSIDE the girl's cubicle would maximize the time that one person gets to stare at his name and face -- and it's true. The thing is, I have no desire to vote for a guy who leers at me whilst I pee (and reflect privately). So, Derek K., stay out of my bathroom stall. The same goes for these chatty, cheeky Monistat ads they have in the stalls at one of the on-campus bars -- "Now that you're sitting down...let's talk about yeast infections." "In case you haven't brought any reading material...here's some information about yeast infections." Dude...just, no. I know what Monistat's for and what it can do for me, if and when I need it. Please don't bring the subject up with me against my will. Especially when I'm having a good time. Please? -Last weekend I read Nick Hornby's How To Be Good in a single day, which is something I haven't done in ages. The midterm I had the next day definitely suffered for it, but really, I think it was worth it. It's exactly the kind of bleakly funny novel that speaks directly to my twisted sense of humour, and frankly I'm baffled at the kinds of reviews it's getting on Amazon. High Fidelity was in the armful of packages I picked up today, though, so that can go on my reading list, somewhere after the last Christopher Moore novel I ordered and the book of Sylvia Plath's poetry that finally showed up. Too many books and that's how I like it! -Finally sorted out 3H03 and it's in the works, so that's one worry off my plate, finally. Now, just to worry about thesis supervisors for next year and my plans for the summer.... -Gotta stop coughing. -My science fiction prof attempted to convince us the other day that Blood Music, a trashy pulp sci-fi novel from the 1980s involving SMART CELLS THAT TAKE OVER THE WORLD!!!!!, is actually subtly modeled on the Divine Comedy by Dante, one of the most celebrated works of literature, like, ever. Her proof for this is that one of the characters in Blood Music, Vergil, shares a name with a character in the Divine Comedy (but he spells it Virgil). I'm thinking that this woman, who spends most of her time teaching medieval literature, is probably feeling a little homesick. -Probably outta space at this point. But that's everything I've wanted to blog about recently, I think.... ~SQ posted by susan | 9:38 PM |
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