I see, in sorting through my piles of stuff, that I have made a note of some things I might post about. Because I want to be sure that you have the absolutely most entertaining reading experience possible, except the opposite of that, I will share this list with you:
- "Jury duty": in which I was an insufferable ass.
- Thanksgiving: a delicious success
- Friends: the handy way that other people make them for me
- Making up syllabi: all of the fun, none of the trouble
- Things to wear under suits: an endlessly vexing genre
- Choosing Christmas presents for oneself: an annual fuckwad
The scare quotes on "jury duty" are there because our friend R. is taking a course in trial tactics this semester, and it's time for the mock trials. Each student has to provide jury members for another student's trial, round-robin style. Last week we served for a "case" in which a woman was suing for wrongful arrest, malicious prosecution, and defamation after having been arrested for allegedly stealing a bottle of perfume. The sub-claims and varying standards of proof were many and complicated, man, and we had no printout of our jury instructions. This was something of an impediment to our making our decisions quickly. Another impediment, however, was that I am apparently ENTIRELY INCAPABLE of restraining myself from talking over every fucking thing, and also kind of incapable of waiting my turn to speak. Because, you see, I am a jackass. Hooray!
I gave a guest lecture for F's class this morning. I got a couple of good laughs by way of using Scooby-Doo as an example of low-quality twist endings, a topical deployment of the "how do you keep an idiot in suspense?" joke, and my stage-whisper delivery of "I see dead people." I count that as a success. Less successfully, I forgot all my skills of kicking off post-lecture discussion with a group other than my own class of adorable moppets, but F. provided a very effective assist there and saved the day.
This rather awesome passage is from James Branch Cabell's Jurgen, published in 1921:
Satan was like a man of sixty, or it might be sixty-two, in all things save that he was covered with grey fur, and had horns like those of a stag. He wore a breech-clout of very dark grey, and he sat in a chair of black marble, on a dais: his bushy tail, which was like that of a squirrel, waved restlessly over his head as he looked at Jurgen, without speaking, and without turning his mind from an ancient thought.
I think that "by Satan's squirrelly tail!" would make a good oath. I only wish there were more opportunity to utter that sort of thing in everyday life. (Obviously, the answer to this is that I must make the opportunity.) The tail comes up again at the end of the chapter: "So Jurgen left the Black House of Barathum: and Jurgen also left Grandfather
Satan, erect and bleak in his tall marble chair, and with his eyes gleaming in the dim light, as he sat there restively swishing his soft bushy tail."
Nice, isn't it?
I was expecting Jurgen to be both weird and ribald, which indeed it is, but I didn't anticipate quite how positively, snickeringly porny it would be. Oh, the lances, their tips red with blood. Oh, the magestically large swords and sticks and scepters. Oh, the shaking of the scepters and the poking with the lances and the hiding of the swords where the nubile young thing could not possibly see them. Oh, indeed.
The hard drive of my home computer, a laptop, appears to be reaching the end of its natural life. I wish that it would hold out until the rumored Apple ThinBook were released and went through its first round of oops! we made this wrong and price reductions, but I fear it will not even make it to the mere original release, provided that ever even happens. It has been whirring away under the tender ministrations of Disk Warrior since yesterday. Very poignant. I must say I've gotten a shitload of reading done in the absence of readily available internet, though.
Here are some things that I have been known to find myself too lazy to do:
1. Change out of my work clothes and into my schlumpy comfy yoga pants;
2. Go upstairs (home) or downstairs (work) that I may pee before it becomes unbearably urgent;
3. Feed myself;
4. Complete my order for something I have been shopping for online, after
I have gone looking all over the Internet for whatever it is, figured
out which one I want, and put it in my shopping bag.
This week has been pretty trying. I can't really go into the reasons why, but it has involved a lot of being extra encouraging and pleasant for the purpose of cheering people into fulfilling their responsibilities to me. Then right when I had finished dealing with a big dose of that, someone tried to give me a piece of candy by "cutely" rolling it across my floor instead of handing it to me. It rolled right under my desk and I hit my head on the underside of my desk when I went to fetch it. I had to act all like I didn't mind but my head STILL HURTS WAH.
I call them "toe lions."
I have carnivorous toenails. Even when I am absolutely on top of
keeping them trimmed, the end of my nail beds falls at a point such
that my big toes, at least, do not provide a helpful buffer between
nails and world. The current very tragic effect of this is that I seem
to be already on the verge of poking a hole in the toe of one of my
precious, discontinued Hue micro-rib over the knee socks. Woe! Is sock
darning something feasible for thinnish modern socks? If so, do I need
to buy a darning egg and a darning needle and where exactly would I
even get suitable darning yarn/thread? I would not know where to begin.
It's "The Jessica Numbers".
When people share their "Top
25 Most Played" music lists complete with play counts, I am freshly
reminded that other people do not listen to music the way I do. I
listen to albums or little temporary mixes on loop all day long all day
all day, and sprinkled in I will get crushes on individual songs and
play them on individual endless loop. I stay in these little
ruts for a week or more on end. And this is how it comes to pass that
my #1 most played song has been played 387 times since I imported my
music library onto this computer a mere five months ago.
No one wants to hear about your cat.
The other day, I was telling Snark about my ingenious plan to wean the cat away from his habit of racing after me and leaping into the sink every time I enter the bathroom. He does this, with great vigor and consistency, because I began turning on a little stream of water for him to drink whenever he happened to be around. The entirely foreseeable leaping behavior is sub-optimal, though, what with the way he sheds all over the sink and the fact that I am often in the bathroom because I want to use the sink, say to brush my teeth, which is somewhat hampered by the presence of a furry, insistent creature filling my spittin' basin. (My ingenious plan, by the way, is to turn on the trickle of water in the bathtub, instead.)
Snark does not have this sink problem, because the cat is apparently capable of remembering that bearded human does not produce delicious water trickle, while russet human does. We were discussing all this, musing about the mind of the cat and its mysterious ways:
Me: Russet human supports life!
Snark: Hey, bearded human supports life too. You just give him water. I give him delicious food.
Me: True.
Snark: And yet he loves you better. Not rational.
Me (brilliantly): Ah, but I give him water. Whereas you are continually not giving him food.
It's true! For every time that Snark actually feeds him, there are probably dozens if not hundreds of times that the cat wants food and is denied. Whereas I am simply not implicated in the food question at all. Ergo, I win.
It comes in a glowing box!
I have a slightly abnormal relationship to television, because we do the thing where you pick a show and download a whole season, or more, and then watch it on the computer, and also I read a shitload of Television Without Pity. Thus I am exposed to a bunch of shows, but all in a strangely optimized way, where I pretty much only ever actually see shows I really like (some objectively good and some not) and then read about both shows I would love and shows I would hate, but always written up very entertainingly. And then sometimes I read all the recaps for a show and then later we get around to watching it, so I get it both ways.
This is certainly very far from not watching TV, and yet... it is not entirely like watching TV. I was reading a conversation somewhere -- maybe on a TWOP forum -- in which an American someone was saying, "British TV is really bizarrely good. Everything I see is decent or better, and lots is fabulous," and then an English person popped up to say, "No, quite the contrary. This is just a function of the fact that you are getting a pretty well chosen subset of the vast trash reality. I had the same impression of American TV. I thought it was just uniformly good to great, all Sopranos and The Wire and Veronica Mars and Frasier. Then I spent a year there and experienced all the crap talk shows and third-tier reality shows and stuff, and learned the meaning of sampling bias."
I think maybe I have made it so that all TV is functionally from across the Atlantic to me. Which is AWESOME, and I love living in the future.
This is all to say that I am really, really enjoying the show Life on Mars. I wonder if the American version will be any good. It is apparently going to feature Colm Meaney, of Star Trek: The Next Generation and The Commitments fame, which could be a point in its favor. (He's playing the Philip Glenister character.) Oddly, it seems that the main character is also being played by an Irish actor. What a natural choice for a US remake of a UK show, set in LA. Weirdos. But anyway, the original is pretty great, and I will be sorry when we run out of episodes. If you watch it, you can be sorry too!
He's my clicking vampire boyfriend.
I love Bill Nighy a lot.
And now I cunningly combine the subjects of Bill Nighy and Life on Mars to remark that I think Snark and I should watch State of Play next. Bonus sexxxy Kelly Macdonald!
I already told this story elsewhere on the Internet, but what the hell. Now with bonus added details!
We went to the house of Dark Manderson and Doctor Peril for Halloween, since last year they got way, way, WAY more kids than we ever do at our place. This year there were not nearly as many, but still more than we would have had at home, for a net win. The most memorable costume of the evening was the one that came with this interaction:
Mark and I open the door to an eleven(?) year old kid in a mustache.
Us: What's your costume?
Kid: I'm Super Mexican!
Me: (thinking, optimistically, that he's got some luchador outfit on under his jacket, or something, I dunno) Oh, awesome.
Kid: (shows off homemade t-shirt reading "I love Home Depot")
Mark: (correctly) Ohhh, that's not right.
Kid: Yeah, that's what my sister said. (pause) And my parents.
Then one of his friends, who was not particularly wearing a costume, said, "I'm me! The one and onlyyyyyy!" and did a sort of jeté/Kermit away.
