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lunasarielNote From The Editor: 'pologies for the potentially wonky formatting/text. I've been wrestling with the bloody RTE since Sunday night, when it up and decided to disappear on me for no reason I can discern. It's back now, and thank Bob that A) bitter experience has taught me to save everything in a Word doc and B) the lovely people at LJ Support managed to rescue my draft and email it to me, so the text isn't as gone as I initially feared. For some reason, none of the HTML imported, though, so if yo see any stray bits of coding, please let me know!
This week started out frustrating, but got better. There was supposed to be a Chernin Program (Networking/extracurricular geeking-out program for English majors) was supposed to have a meeting Wednesday night...but something happened. I'm not sure what. Either I completely forgot what room it's in (which, okay, wouldn't be entirely unprecedented), or it somehow got called off without me knowing about it. But I wandered the area where it always is, which isn't all that big, for, like, 15 minutes without seeing anyone else from my group, or even from any of the other groups. So that was weird.
That aside, though, most of the aforementioned frustration was due to my Stark and Tyrell t-shirts, which arrived at the Berkeley post office on Tuesday, but just, like, sat there until Thursday. I was especially *rageface* about this because I'd have really liked to wash them before I wore them (one of the, like, 10 episodes of House I've seen was the one where two guys start dying and nobody can figure out why, until House realizes that they bought jeans from the same guy, and *that* guy left them out where they got sprayed with some sort of eeeevil chemical before selling them, but if the two victims had washed the damn jeans before wearing them, it wouldn't have happened.No, I'm not neurotic at all, why do you ask? But I digress), but I held off doing my laundry for as long as possible on Tuesday, when I was pretty sure they were arriving, so that I could wash them with everything else. But now it's going to be another week before I have enough laundry for a load, so I guess I just have to hope that I haven't suddenly shifted into the House-verse and the HBO people sprayed my shirts with deadly chemicals for some reason.
At the beginning of the semester, we all had to sign up to write a paper for my ENGL 45B discussion group in teams of three. I remember specifically signing up for the paper on Jane Austen, but somehow, I ended up doing 1/3 of the one on Keats and Shelley instead. Whatever, they were fun guys, and as it was written during a slow week, I actually had some fun researching it. But this week's paper, which actually was on Jane Austen, is teeth-grindingly annoying. OK, maybe it's just because Austen is only behind Tolkien, my favorite author, and tied with Terry Pratchett and GRRM for second favorite, so I'm kind ofnitpicky sensitive about this kind of thing. But seriously, I have a hard time believing that this was written by not one, but two college students, and for a college-level class. I mean, the first sentence of the paper reads thus: "Jane Austen (16 December 1775 - 18 July 1817) was an American novelist who became popular after her first few books were published." Because 19th century Americans had an entrenched system of exclusive noble families and were totally into the Napoleonic Wars, the London season, and baronets. The authors mention only three characters in the paper, and all three names are misspelled at least once. The main character's name is misspelled no less than five times in two pages. Jane Austen's name is misspelled. Twice. And this isn't even mentioning all the misplaced and/or missing commas and apostrophes, or even just the average typos, that one time the primary military conflict of the era was described as, verbatim, "the napoleon wars," or the fact that the authors apparently feel justified in saying "Like most of Jane Austin's novels, Persuasion centers on a love story that is sadly predictable" (again, all misspellings have been preserved). I mean, how do you do this? Just how? At least three of these errors could be corrected by reading the cover of the book! As you can tell by my excessive use of italics, this has me a wee bit irked. I...just...but...gaaaah!
Okay, moving on. I finally found a copy of the highly recommended Temeraire-verse short story "In Autumn, a White Dragon Looks Over the Wide River" on Tumblr, and, as expected, it made me more fascinated with Lien than ever, even if it didn't exactly make me fall in love with her. She's clearly still grieving for Prince Yongxing, and her starting to see Napoleon as a replacement for him, instead of just an ally of convenience, is interesting. I can see why she takes to him so quickly, though: he respects her not only as an intelligent (even brilliant) being, but as a strategist and military commander, even a dietician! Unlike from Temeraire's or Laurence's POVs, we get an excellent contrast in the wildly different treatments of Chinese and European dragons, and Lien's unique viewpoint really makes it hit home the way even Temeraire's couldn't. Because she thinks of herself, and dragons in general, as deserving no different treatment from a human, she's genuinely shocked and horrified at being treated like an animal and expected to be grateful for it. The entire time, I kept thinking how ridiculous and insulting her treatment would be if she were a human of comparable rank, because that's pretty much how she thinks of herself. I mean, can you imagine a Chinese princess stuck under a sailcloth pavilion, given a trough of water to drink from and a couple of live cows to eat, and sent a bunch of illiterate soldiers to get pregnant by?
Speaking of soldiers, Lumière, Fraternité, and Sûreté made for some great secondary characters. All their interactions with Lien were lol-worthy, but I especially loved the scene where she decides to make the best of these three dumbasses and try to teach them to write. I can easily imagine her copious eye-rolling, sighing, and commentary to the tree on how amazed she is that dragons thought fit company for a Celestial should have so much trouble learning characters that every Chinese child, both human and dragon, can draw with perfect ease. But just in general, her facepalming (faceclawing?) at them got quite a few lulz from me, especially due to their reactions to her. They didn't get offended, they just didn't have the faintest clue how to react to someone like her, so they gave it their best shot and were perplexed by her response.
I don't normally have an eye for quotes, but this one kind of leapt out at me: "Such an unbalanced amount of yang makes for unquiet temperament, which is likely why you would do something so peculiar as breathe fire in the middle of a conversation," Lien said, quellingly. Now I kind of want to hear her thoughts on meeting Iskierka, who was even more yangy than usual at the time, on account of Granby's capture (as well as, I suspect, guilt at her part in same). Lines like these make me more pissed than ever that she never even got a single line in Crucible of Gold, which, IMO, is the one major failing of the book. But this gave me my Lien fix that should have been filled by CoG, so now I'm good for a while.
In other Temeraire-related news, this week's fanart, of which a new one goes up on Naomi Novik's website every Friday, has me a bit "meh." It's Lizzie Bennet, who both author and fans seem to agree should have a Longwing of her own. A lot of people are elated to see her get her own dragon, when she's clearly so far above the petty little games that people of her social class play to get one up on each other, and while I agree that she deserves stimulation and excitement for her extraordinary wit and intelligence, it kind of feels that making her an aviator, I dunno, cheapens her victory? Because she did win in the end: she beat everyone who said that she wasn't highborn enough for Darcy, that she was too smart to ever make a good match, all of it. But she did it by beating them at their own game. She won by realizing how it's played, knowing the rules without internalizing them, and systematically proving wrong everyone who said she would fail. By her ultimate happiness and high position, she proves that her intelligence and snark are advantages, not handicaps. Removing her from society entirely and making her an aviator kind of makes me feel like we're missing out on something great. If she wins as an aviator, it'll be assumed that it's due to her status as an outsider in polite society, but Lizzie Bennett is very much an insider, and uses that insider knowledge to her advantage. That is, if she's even given a chance to participate in the kind of delicate social situation that aviators would have almost certainly been excluded from. Basically, Lizzie Bennet's CMoAs don't need to be physical and flashy. Anybody can be snarky and witty and independent-minded and feminist when raised in a cloistered subculture that highly values all those traits, whereas her being all these things, and using them to overcome more conformist and/or narrow-minded opponents in a society that just wants her to be meek, docile, and stupid, is, IMO, a much more spectacular victory, and one much more deserving of praise. I'm afraid that "ZOMG CAP'N LIZZIE KICKS ASS!!!!"* will overshadow Elizabeth Bennet's quieter, but actually much more impressive, triumph. Because if Lizzie goes off and becomes a captain, all of her spirit will be written off as the result of living among those wild aviators, and she'll never get a chance to prove that smart chicks are, indeed, sexy.
TL;DR: maintaining one's independence and spirit in the face of a soul-crushingly conformist society > winning a battle on dragon-back. Sorry, fandom.
* = Disclaimer: I'm not saying that "ZOMG CAP'N LIZZIE KICKS ASS!!!!" is a bad thing in and of itself, but only when it eclipses the recognition of her extremely important canonical victories.
To make up for the decidedly lackluster week, this weekend was AWESOME. We didn't even address the headdesk-inducingly stupid paper in class on Friday, which I suspect was a deliberate move on the GSI's part, as we almost always begin class with a discussion of that week's paper. After class, I thought I had a Chernin Program event on applying to grad school, but being the genius I am, I misread the invitation email, and it turns out that it's next Friday, not this Friday, so I spent most of the day hanging out with M instead. She wanted a new umbrella, since her old one finally gave up the ghost and we had a pretty stunning thunderstorm on Thursday night (I think it was Thursday?). So we went to a shop that we only know as "the hat shop" on Telegraph, where she picked out a rather old-school looking umbrella, complete with a pointy metal tip, curved handle, and everything. It looks like it could be concealing a sword in the handle. The hat shop is tiny, but, of course, filled with hats of literally every description one can imagine, so we spent quite a while just poking around, trying on hats and loling at some of the more ridiculous ones. I've been looking for another hat, of the same style as my current one (which I recently found out is a cloche hat, but I've always thought of as a 20s hat), but of a stiffer material and different color. The hat shop has plenty of cloches, but, as it turns out, either my head is really tiny, they're all really big, or this style of hat is supposed to be a really loose fit, so I didn't find any that I liked, although there was a very nice teal one that came close. After that, we just wandered around for a bit, browsing through Moe's Books and trying really, really hard not to buy a hardbound Hark! A Vagrant collection or a copy of Good Omens with the white cover because we both already have the black cover, even though it would be really cool to have both mirror image covers. After we had mastered ourselves sufficiently, we had dinner at Crossroads, where they were serving black forest fudge pie and hot dogs. That evening, we watched X-Men: First Class, which I hadn't seen in a good long while, so it was a night of unabashed squeeing. It certainly helps that we're both big Charles/Erik shippers and have both seen XMFC several times, so we could pause it every so often and make undignified squealing noises at each other from time to time, yell at the characters for being a bunch of self-sabotaging idiots, etc. NO REGRETS!
Saturday I slept in and footled about with Northanger Abbey and Wuthering Heights (reading is picking back up again; oh, joy), but the highlight of the day was definitely going into San Francisco for another meet-up with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hamsterwoman, which was as much fun as always. I've been late the past couple of times, so this time I gave myself more than two hours, leaving my room at 3:45 for a 6:00 dinner. This turned out to be an instance of erring on the side of caution, because I got to the Embarcadero station, where I leave the BART train that takes me from Berkeley into the City in exchange for a MUNI train that takes me from Embarcadero to Anna's environs (which is vaguely alliterative) at about 4:50, even after a mysterious and fairly lengthy delay in Oakland. I took this as a sign, and spent a half hour or so taking a much-needed chunk out of Wuthering Heights, which I'd brought with me for just such an occasion. The MUNI station was fairly packed with Giants fans (apparently there was a Big Game of some sort that day), but nevertheless I found a good spot to sit and wait until ~5:30, when I could hope to arrive at Parkside Tavern, our meeting spot of choice, not too horrendously early. hamsterwoman brought her son O, who was in quest of baked mac'n'cheese (which did, in fact, look quite tasty), along, and I was extremely impressed with him. He sat very quietly and ate most of his mac'n'cheese with no fuss or drama, feats I certainly couldn't have hoped for from A at that age, and which even I, who both my parents always say was an unusually quiet kid, might have had some trouble with. I asked both Anna and O about their thoughts on AtLA, which I've been thinking of recommending to the MW family, but after the Doctor Who Incident (Cousin MW, who is O's age, had nightmares after watching the first two episodes on my say-so, which I felt really bad about), I'm extremely careful about anything I recommend to them having scary or distressing content. But it sounds like there's nothing too objectionable in there, and it seems that there's enough for grown-ups to enjoy, too, so I think I can steer Aunt MW, who generally picks entertainment for the family, towards it with a clear conscience. Aside from that, we had fun talking about all the usual stuff: LotR, ASOIAF, the upcoming Hobbit movies, sci-fi of various stripes, and, new to this time, the new shows we've gotten each other hooked on: Babylon 5 in my case, Sherlock in hers. I also got a couple new Dragaera books, which have been assimilated into my Reading/To Read pile, and which I'm very much looking forward to, especially Morrolan apparently spending decades among humans and not realizing that he's of an entirely different species. XD
Food-wise, I got my bangers'n'mash fix, although once again I failed to finish it all. I'd forgotten that they mix lightly cooked onions in with the mashed potatoes, which is a great addition, and one I might have to try myself one of these days. We finished with an Asian pear and blackberry crumble (a bit heavy on the pears and light on the blackberries, but the crumble itself was nice) topped with Guinness ice cream, which was...odd. It was tasty, moreso than I thought it would be, but if I didn't know the flavor was Guinness beforehand, I wouldn't have been able to tell. After dinner, Anna and O walked me up to the burrito place she pointed out to me last time, and I actually managed to get the burrito home without losing it on the train, unlike last time. I nibbled at it all throughout Sunday (it's huge), and I'm happy to say that, not only does it travel and reheat well, it's damn good! I forgot to ask for no salsa, so it's spicier than I normally eat them, but there's a good proportion of ingredients, and everything, especially the carnitas and cheese, are yummy! So, yeah, El Burrito Express: highly recommended!
I meant for Sunday to be a homework day, but it turned out to be primarily a Pottermore day instead. I should have expected this, since my previous experience with WoW has proven that I'm not good with these immersive RPG-ish things, but I woke up around 11 (sleeping in again, woohoo!), created my account, and all of a sudden it was almost 7 PM and I've only read 30 pages of Northanger Abbey! Pottermore, as it turns out, is one of those things that just sucks up time: there's so many fiddly little things to take care of, all of which are rewarded in one form or another, and there's no good stopping point, so one ends up thinking "Okay, just one more chapter...just gotta collect a few more Galleons...brew one more potion...holy crap, where did those three hours go?!" I suspect that the main draw of Pottermore is the sorting and wand-selection. I was hoping to be sorted as a Ravenclaw, but I ended up as a Gryffindor, which, okay. I consider myself much more diffident and clever than brave and idealistic, but, hey, I get to hang out with the main characters, and our Quidditch team is pretty good. My wand is ebony and phoenix feather, 10 inches, hard, which apparently means that I'm *deep breath* an inflexible, short, non-conformist, unique, detached idealist who's good at combat magic and Transfiguration. I guess I can see this, although it wouldn't have been my initial description of myself. But, hey, there's that Stark/Tyrell conflict again: I have ideals, but I don't get too fussed about every little thing. My username is HeartBronze18858 if any of y'all want to add me; so far the only people I know on there arehamsterwoman and The Roomie (who, of course, is over the moon about Pottermore finally being open to us commoners, and texted me at 9 AM on Saturday with her username).
And last but not least: meme time! Yet another non-character one, but another sort of general fandom/RL one. We'll be back to geekier fare soon, though, never fear.
1) What is your favorite item that you own?
Practical item: my laptop. Sleekerton, the current incarnation (in conjunction with Skippyjon, my iPhone) pretty much owns/runs my life. It’s pretty much the center of my professional and, er, fangirly lives, and lays a claim to a good portion of my social and academic lives as well. I spend more time than I’d like to admit on it (in fact, I’m typing on it right now), and I’m fairly certain that I’d be in all kinds of trouble without it.
Sentimental item: my copy (copies? One book in three volumes, anyway) of The Lord of the Rings. The cover art isn’t the prettiest, their front and back covers are only held on by several layers of increasingly elderly tape, the pages are yellowed, dog-eared, and covered in mysterious stains (I’m an incorrigible reader at tables), and random pages are marked by bits of tissues and ticket stubs for no apparent reason. Perfection, right? They’ve travelled to the UK/Ireland twice, Australia once, New York once, and Oklahoma three or four times. Aside from being my favorite work of fiction ever, the physical books themselves are important to me, as they’ve stuck with me for the last decade or so, and have seen me through quite a bit.
2) What is the last movie that you’ve seen?
Iron Man 2, with M on Monday.* My Angry Feminist™ issues with it are too severe for me to call it my favorite Avengers-verse movie (before The Avengers itself comes out, anyway), but I think it is the best executed. The special effects are extremely impressive, RDJ was perfectly cast, and the villains and tech were a hell of a lot of fun (although M and I occasionally indulged our inner twelve-year-olds by re-dubbing all of Justin Hammer’s dialogue with “douche,” with the occasional “I’m a douche” thrown in for variety. Why, yes, we are worldly and sophisticated college students attending one of the most prestigious universities in the United States).
* = written before the weekend.
3) If you could be one fictional character, who would you be?
Ooh, tough one (as always)! For the moment, I’m going to have to go with Merry Brandybuck. His life is a good blend of hobbity pleasantness and ease, and Tookish excitement. Speaking of Tookishness, his journey isn’t quite as harrowing as Frodo’s and Sam’s but he’s cannier and less flaily than Pippin. His greatest personal losses are the death of Théoden and Frodo and later Sam going to the Undying Lands. He participates in the slaying of the Witch-King of Angmar, gets made a Knight of Rohan, hangs out with Ents, sees some of the last Elves, and just generally achieves a perfect balance between interestingness and peace.
4) Describe your room as well as you can.
For the moment, I share a double dorm with The Roomie. My half of the room is the left-hand side as you enter. Directly across from the (thick, heavy, and prone to sticking) door is a large window that takes up most of the far wall, out of which I can see People’s Park, most of the city of Berkeley, a good portion of the San Francisco Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, and San Francisco itself off to the left. Directly under the window is a pair of desks, the left one of which is mine. My portable (well, for a certain value of “portable,” anyway) wireless printer/scanner/copier is rather buried under two stacks of books: one of leisure (ha!) reading, one of textbooks. My desk itself has various bits of detritus, such as a tiny Christmas stocking left over from last year, a baggie containing burned discs of the first season of Babylon 5, a mini stapler, some colored post-it tabs, and assorted cables and chargers. My alarm clock, earplugs, lamp, and laptop, in that order from back to front, are set up as to be best used from my bed, directly to the left of my desk. The bed itself is narrow and long. The fitted sheet is red flannel, and the sheet and pillowcase are blue flannel. The comforter is sort of a light tan on the underside, and a darker brown on top. It could use a wash. At the moment, my pillow is replaced by one of those big pillows with armrests, this one a light blue plush, which protects my back from being poked from the headboard, which consists of two posts and a rail. The left-hand wall of the room, which is mine, is decorated with bunches of dried lavender, posters (a map of Middle-Earth, another one of Beleriand, a Temeraire one that came with my boxed set, and a rather cat-mauled one of white and orange tiger cubs playing), a schedule of my classes, four miniature paintings (two Van Gough reproductions, one Monet reproduction, and one my mom did in Italy), a photo of H and I as wee ones making faces on our elementary school soccer field, and three necklaces (a green d20 with gold numbers in a wire cage that H gave to all her bridesmaids [yes, it was that kind of wedding], a totally-not-a-TARDIS-key and miniature rose charm on a chain that H gave to me when I left for England, and a bronze owl with onyx eyes that J recently brought me back from Israel). In my corner not taken up by my bed, which is right up against the wall, there’s a mirror, under which is a little dresser that I use to store sweaters, scarves, etc. On top are what toiletries I don’t keep in the bathroom: contact case, contact cleaner, hairbrush, body splash, vitamins, hand lotion, water bottle, and, rather inexplicably, two plates and a full set of silverware. Don’t ask. My closet is on the other side of the wall that divides our room from the hall, and contains a much larger dresser where I keep my actual clothes, with shoes that I don’t wear everyday (boots, nice sandals, flats, and plastic flip-flops for the shower). My heavy coat and robe are on hangars in the other half of the closet, as is the giant box I moved in with. There’s a shelf running the length of the top couple of feet of the closet, where I keep detergent, my hat, and snacks of various kinds. My netted laundry bag hangs on one of the many hooks on the back of my closet. My towel hangs on the bar of the closet door. There’s an Amazon box on the floor by the little dresser that has been repurposed to store whatever notebooks I don’t need on any particular day, and my most often worn shoes (slippers and sneakers) are between the little dresser and my bed. There’s a scale under my bed, because I’ve discovered a tendency to get plump if I eat too much Berkeley food. There are also two long drawers built into/under my bed. The top drawer is filled with my own stuff: some fiction waiting to be read, some reference books, some DVDs (mostly BBC-generated), my Tolkien (of course), and a couple of bookmarks. The bottom drawer is where I keep all of my textbooks that aren’t needed for the moment, as well as receipts for said textbooks, so I can sell them back and return the rented ones at the end of the semester. Whew! I think that’s everything. (Oh, and my desk is full of office supplies, official documents that I might need, etc.)
5) What do you typically wear?
I’m usually a fairly boring dresser. Jeans, t-shirt (preferably nerdy in some capacity), sneakers (New Balance), and a hoodie/sweater if it’s cold. I might on occasion mix it up with long floofy skirts instead of jeans, or flats/boots instead of sneakers, but generally I stick with the basics.
6) What do you order on a pizza?
Pineapple and olives, and maybe sausage, depending on how greasy/spicy the sausage is at whatever place I’m ordering from.
7) How good are your teeth?
Pretty damn good! I’ve never had a cavity, but I have had to have my teeth sanded down on occasion due to chipping (yes, it felt weird). But in general, I’m very happy that my teeth give me so little trouble.
8) How long have you had your LiveJournal?
*checks* Since October 2007. Wow, it really has been a while! Just out of curiosity, I went back to read my first post, and it was about baking cookies and Nightwish getting a new singer. Huh.
9) What’s the one thing that changed your life the most?
Moving to Sebastopol, I think. It goes without saying that my friends and memories would have been entirely different if we had stayed in Vacaville, St. Helena, or Australia, but living in the country outside a small Northern California town has pretty much made my life what it is. My parents divorced at least in part because my dad was always working on some vineyard half a day’s drive away, and so was never home, but pretty much everywhere else, he managed wineries within walking distance, or at worst only a ten-minute drive. Because we live way the hell out in the country, there weren’t any other kids that lived near us growing up, so I was kind of lonely a lot of the time, which led to me having a lot of free time, which led to me spending that time reading, which led to, um, this. And by “this,” I mean my generally fangirly nature.
10) How long did your longest relationship last?
Almost three years. Well, two and a half, anyway. Actually, funny story about this: when we had been together for about a year, J and I realized that our anniversary was coming up, but neither of us could remember the date. Basically, our conversation went like:
J: So when’s our anniversary? We should do something.
Me: Hell if I know. Wasn’t it somewhere around the Apple Blossom Parade (annual event, huge for my high school because our marching band led the parade)? But, yeah, we should probably do something.
J: Aren’t girls supposed to keep track of these things?
Me: *shrug*
Yes, we were that kind of couple.
11) What do you ship the most?
I’m pretty sure this is asking what my main OTPs are, so I’ll go with Renly/Loras, Charles/Erik, Billy/Teddy, and Amy/Rory, at least for the moment.
12) How many people do you have in your phone’s address book?
A nice, round 80, as it turns out. Wow. I didn't think I knew so many people (although how many of those people’s info is still good is uncertain.)
13) A stranger grants you a box with a button inside, and informs you that you have 24 hours to press the button, although you do not have to. If you choose to do so, then one person that you do not know will die. But, you will receive one million dollars. Do you press the button? (The Box reference)
Nope. I’m not that hard up for money, at least not yet.
14) What is your top played song on Last.fm? (If you do not have Last.fm, then iTunes).
iTunes, because I am an iWhore: “Voodoo Child,” by Rogue Traders. I first heard it on Doctor Who, but it eventually became the unofficial anthem for my D&D group (although it did have to share that title with “Never Split the Party,” by Emerald Rose, or alternatively here, as illustrated by AtLA, Dresden Files, LotR, The Mummy, and The Road to El Dorado). We are enormous nerds, if you haven’t figured that out yet.
15) What movie have you watched the most?
In recent years, certainly the LotR trilogy, but overall, probably either the Disney or Erroll Flynn version of Robin Hood, which I literally used to watch five or six times a week, when I was a wee one.
16) What’s one song that defines how you feel right now?
I don’t know if “stuck in my head” counts as “feels like,” but I’m rather liking "Vater Unser," by E Nomine. It came up on my iPod on my way back from San Francisco Saturday night, and it’s one of those songs that automatically makes the listener feel like a badass, regardless of what they actually happen to be doing at the time. It lends itself to striding.
17) If you could tell one girl something right now, what would it be?
Real:hamsterwoman: thanks for a great night out! One of the many reasons I’m glad I chose Cal over UCLA is that I’ve got a fandom-buddy within travelling distance, a fact which lends itself to many conversations about things like 90s TV shows and the interrelations between Discworld, Dragaera, the Dresden Files, and AOSIAF. Also, thanks for feeding and/or inducing my various addictions. XD
Fictional: Hermione Granger: stick with those two idiots, especially the red-headed one. I’m not saying they get any less dumb, but they do get more interesting and generally nicer.
18) If you could tell one boy something right now, what would it be?
Real: P: I’m really glad that you're enjoying your English class, but do you really want to take a minor in it? You change your major/career path every six months anyway, so if you’re going to take a minor, make sure it’s something that you’ll stick with. Also, you know that I'm always happy to talk to you, but I'm not a thesaurus, and texting works just as well as calling for "give me a word for this specific weird emotion/reaction for my ENGL 1B paper."
Fictional: Magneto: how can someone be so smart and so stupid at the same time? Here’s a hint: if your family reunions only happen if you kidnap half the participants and contain threats of dismemberment, you’re doing something wrong. (Also, you really, really could have picked a better time to dump your boyfriend. In fact, you shouldn’t have dumped him at all, for obvious reasons as well as the fact that you ended up joining, and even occasionally leading, the X-Men, so you stomping off in a huff didn’t do as much good as you thought.)
19) If your emotions were people, who do you think you’d be best friends with?
Contentment would make an excellent roommate, I guess, although Fangirly Glee and I would go out for drinks a couple of nights a week.
20) Ask one TMI question.
What’s that smell? (The answer rarely makes the smell any better, and is just as rarely anything other than embarrassing.)
21) What are you most passionate about?
Various fandoms and/or pairings, mostly. The closest things I have to IRL Causes are same-sex marriage/gay rights and animal rights. TBH, though, I’m much more active in my fangirly passions than IRL ones, as in I can give you a longer (and quicker) list of reasons why Tolkien is one of the greatest authors of the 20th century or why genre literature deserves academic attention than why this or that political/social change should be made, why X viewpoint is right/wrong/*ist, etc.
22) How would you describe your frequency to being horny?
I don’t know what an average frequency is or anything, but subjectively speaking, not all that often. The lack of any kind of relationship in which sex is a possibility for the past few years probably has something to do with this; I’m used to it by now.
This week started out frustrating, but got better. There was supposed to be a Chernin Program (Networking/extracurricular geeking-out program for English majors) was supposed to have a meeting Wednesday night...but something happened. I'm not sure what. Either I completely forgot what room it's in (which, okay, wouldn't be entirely unprecedented), or it somehow got called off without me knowing about it. But I wandered the area where it always is, which isn't all that big, for, like, 15 minutes without seeing anyone else from my group, or even from any of the other groups. So that was weird.
That aside, though, most of the aforementioned frustration was due to my Stark and Tyrell t-shirts, which arrived at the Berkeley post office on Tuesday, but just, like, sat there until Thursday. I was especially *rageface* about this because I'd have really liked to wash them before I wore them (one of the, like, 10 episodes of House I've seen was the one where two guys start dying and nobody can figure out why, until House realizes that they bought jeans from the same guy, and *that* guy left them out where they got sprayed with some sort of eeeevil chemical before selling them, but if the two victims had washed the damn jeans before wearing them, it wouldn't have happened.
At the beginning of the semester, we all had to sign up to write a paper for my ENGL 45B discussion group in teams of three. I remember specifically signing up for the paper on Jane Austen, but somehow, I ended up doing 1/3 of the one on Keats and Shelley instead. Whatever, they were fun guys, and as it was written during a slow week, I actually had some fun researching it. But this week's paper, which actually was on Jane Austen, is teeth-grindingly annoying. OK, maybe it's just because Austen is only behind Tolkien, my favorite author, and tied with Terry Pratchett and GRRM for second favorite, so I'm kind of
Okay, moving on. I finally found a copy of the highly recommended Temeraire-verse short story "In Autumn, a White Dragon Looks Over the Wide River" on Tumblr, and, as expected, it made me more fascinated with Lien than ever, even if it didn't exactly make me fall in love with her. She's clearly still grieving for Prince Yongxing, and her starting to see Napoleon as a replacement for him, instead of just an ally of convenience, is interesting. I can see why she takes to him so quickly, though: he respects her not only as an intelligent (even brilliant) being, but as a strategist and military commander, even a dietician! Unlike from Temeraire's or Laurence's POVs, we get an excellent contrast in the wildly different treatments of Chinese and European dragons, and Lien's unique viewpoint really makes it hit home the way even Temeraire's couldn't. Because she thinks of herself, and dragons in general, as deserving no different treatment from a human, she's genuinely shocked and horrified at being treated like an animal and expected to be grateful for it. The entire time, I kept thinking how ridiculous and insulting her treatment would be if she were a human of comparable rank, because that's pretty much how she thinks of herself. I mean, can you imagine a Chinese princess stuck under a sailcloth pavilion, given a trough of water to drink from and a couple of live cows to eat, and sent a bunch of illiterate soldiers to get pregnant by?
Speaking of soldiers, Lumière, Fraternité, and Sûreté made for some great secondary characters. All their interactions with Lien were lol-worthy, but I especially loved the scene where she decides to make the best of these three dumbasses and try to teach them to write. I can easily imagine her copious eye-rolling, sighing, and commentary to the tree on how amazed she is that dragons thought fit company for a Celestial should have so much trouble learning characters that every Chinese child, both human and dragon, can draw with perfect ease. But just in general, her facepalming (faceclawing?) at them got quite a few lulz from me, especially due to their reactions to her. They didn't get offended, they just didn't have the faintest clue how to react to someone like her, so they gave it their best shot and were perplexed by her response.
I don't normally have an eye for quotes, but this one kind of leapt out at me: "Such an unbalanced amount of yang makes for unquiet temperament, which is likely why you would do something so peculiar as breathe fire in the middle of a conversation," Lien said, quellingly. Now I kind of want to hear her thoughts on meeting Iskierka, who was even more yangy than usual at the time, on account of Granby's capture (as well as, I suspect, guilt at her part in same). Lines like these make me more pissed than ever that she never even got a single line in Crucible of Gold, which, IMO, is the one major failing of the book. But this gave me my Lien fix that should have been filled by CoG, so now I'm good for a while.
In other Temeraire-related news, this week's fanart, of which a new one goes up on Naomi Novik's website every Friday, has me a bit "meh." It's Lizzie Bennet, who both author and fans seem to agree should have a Longwing of her own. A lot of people are elated to see her get her own dragon, when she's clearly so far above the petty little games that people of her social class play to get one up on each other, and while I agree that she deserves stimulation and excitement for her extraordinary wit and intelligence, it kind of feels that making her an aviator, I dunno, cheapens her victory? Because she did win in the end: she beat everyone who said that she wasn't highborn enough for Darcy, that she was too smart to ever make a good match, all of it. But she did it by beating them at their own game. She won by realizing how it's played, knowing the rules without internalizing them, and systematically proving wrong everyone who said she would fail. By her ultimate happiness and high position, she proves that her intelligence and snark are advantages, not handicaps. Removing her from society entirely and making her an aviator kind of makes me feel like we're missing out on something great. If she wins as an aviator, it'll be assumed that it's due to her status as an outsider in polite society, but Lizzie Bennett is very much an insider, and uses that insider knowledge to her advantage. That is, if she's even given a chance to participate in the kind of delicate social situation that aviators would have almost certainly been excluded from. Basically, Lizzie Bennet's CMoAs don't need to be physical and flashy. Anybody can be snarky and witty and independent-minded and feminist when raised in a cloistered subculture that highly values all those traits, whereas her being all these things, and using them to overcome more conformist and/or narrow-minded opponents in a society that just wants her to be meek, docile, and stupid, is, IMO, a much more spectacular victory, and one much more deserving of praise. I'm afraid that "ZOMG CAP'N LIZZIE KICKS ASS!!!!"* will overshadow Elizabeth Bennet's quieter, but actually much more impressive, triumph. Because if Lizzie goes off and becomes a captain, all of her spirit will be written off as the result of living among those wild aviators, and she'll never get a chance to prove that smart chicks are, indeed, sexy.
TL;DR: maintaining one's independence and spirit in the face of a soul-crushingly conformist society > winning a battle on dragon-back. Sorry, fandom.
* = Disclaimer: I'm not saying that "ZOMG CAP'N LIZZIE KICKS ASS!!!!" is a bad thing in and of itself, but only when it eclipses the recognition of her extremely important canonical victories.
To make up for the decidedly lackluster week, this weekend was AWESOME. We didn't even address the headdesk-inducingly stupid paper in class on Friday, which I suspect was a deliberate move on the GSI's part, as we almost always begin class with a discussion of that week's paper. After class, I thought I had a Chernin Program event on applying to grad school, but being the genius I am, I misread the invitation email, and it turns out that it's next Friday, not this Friday, so I spent most of the day hanging out with M instead. She wanted a new umbrella, since her old one finally gave up the ghost and we had a pretty stunning thunderstorm on Thursday night (I think it was Thursday?). So we went to a shop that we only know as "the hat shop" on Telegraph, where she picked out a rather old-school looking umbrella, complete with a pointy metal tip, curved handle, and everything. It looks like it could be concealing a sword in the handle. The hat shop is tiny, but, of course, filled with hats of literally every description one can imagine, so we spent quite a while just poking around, trying on hats and loling at some of the more ridiculous ones. I've been looking for another hat, of the same style as my current one (which I recently found out is a cloche hat, but I've always thought of as a 20s hat), but of a stiffer material and different color. The hat shop has plenty of cloches, but, as it turns out, either my head is really tiny, they're all really big, or this style of hat is supposed to be a really loose fit, so I didn't find any that I liked, although there was a very nice teal one that came close. After that, we just wandered around for a bit, browsing through Moe's Books and trying really, really hard not to buy a hardbound Hark! A Vagrant collection or a copy of Good Omens with the white cover because we both already have the black cover, even though it would be really cool to have both mirror image covers. After we had mastered ourselves sufficiently, we had dinner at Crossroads, where they were serving black forest fudge pie and hot dogs. That evening, we watched X-Men: First Class, which I hadn't seen in a good long while, so it was a night of unabashed squeeing. It certainly helps that we're both big Charles/Erik shippers and have both seen XMFC several times, so we could pause it every so often and make undignified squealing noises at each other from time to time, yell at the characters for being a bunch of self-sabotaging idiots, etc. NO REGRETS!
Saturday I slept in and footled about with Northanger Abbey and Wuthering Heights (reading is picking back up again; oh, joy), but the highlight of the day was definitely going into San Francisco for another meet-up with
hamsterwoman, which was as much fun as always. I've been late the past couple of times, so this time I gave myself more than two hours, leaving my room at 3:45 for a 6:00 dinner. This turned out to be an instance of erring on the side of caution, because I got to the Embarcadero station, where I leave the BART train that takes me from Berkeley into the City in exchange for a MUNI train that takes me from Embarcadero to Anna's environs (which is vaguely alliterative) at about 4:50, even after a mysterious and fairly lengthy delay in Oakland. I took this as a sign, and spent a half hour or so taking a much-needed chunk out of Wuthering Heights, which I'd brought with me for just such an occasion. The MUNI station was fairly packed with Giants fans (apparently there was a Big Game of some sort that day), but nevertheless I found a good spot to sit and wait until ~5:30, when I could hope to arrive at Parkside Tavern, our meeting spot of choice, not too horrendously early. hamsterwoman brought her son O, who was in quest of baked mac'n'cheese (which did, in fact, look quite tasty), along, and I was extremely impressed with him. He sat very quietly and ate most of his mac'n'cheese with no fuss or drama, feats I certainly couldn't have hoped for from A at that age, and which even I, who both my parents always say was an unusually quiet kid, might have had some trouble with. I asked both Anna and O about their thoughts on AtLA, which I've been thinking of recommending to the MW family, but after the Doctor Who Incident (Cousin MW, who is O's age, had nightmares after watching the first two episodes on my say-so, which I felt really bad about), I'm extremely careful about anything I recommend to them having scary or distressing content. But it sounds like there's nothing too objectionable in there, and it seems that there's enough for grown-ups to enjoy, too, so I think I can steer Aunt MW, who generally picks entertainment for the family, towards it with a clear conscience. Aside from that, we had fun talking about all the usual stuff: LotR, ASOIAF, the upcoming Hobbit movies, sci-fi of various stripes, and, new to this time, the new shows we've gotten each other hooked on: Babylon 5 in my case, Sherlock in hers. I also got a couple new Dragaera books, which have been assimilated into my Reading/To Read pile, and which I'm very much looking forward to, especially Morrolan apparently spending decades among humans and not realizing that he's of an entirely different species. XDFood-wise, I got my bangers'n'mash fix, although once again I failed to finish it all. I'd forgotten that they mix lightly cooked onions in with the mashed potatoes, which is a great addition, and one I might have to try myself one of these days. We finished with an Asian pear and blackberry crumble (a bit heavy on the pears and light on the blackberries, but the crumble itself was nice) topped with Guinness ice cream, which was...odd. It was tasty, moreso than I thought it would be, but if I didn't know the flavor was Guinness beforehand, I wouldn't have been able to tell. After dinner, Anna and O walked me up to the burrito place she pointed out to me last time, and I actually managed to get the burrito home without losing it on the train, unlike last time. I nibbled at it all throughout Sunday (it's huge), and I'm happy to say that, not only does it travel and reheat well, it's damn good! I forgot to ask for no salsa, so it's spicier than I normally eat them, but there's a good proportion of ingredients, and everything, especially the carnitas and cheese, are yummy! So, yeah, El Burrito Express: highly recommended!
I meant for Sunday to be a homework day, but it turned out to be primarily a Pottermore day instead. I should have expected this, since my previous experience with WoW has proven that I'm not good with these immersive RPG-ish things, but I woke up around 11 (sleeping in again, woohoo!), created my account, and all of a sudden it was almost 7 PM and I've only read 30 pages of Northanger Abbey! Pottermore, as it turns out, is one of those things that just sucks up time: there's so many fiddly little things to take care of, all of which are rewarded in one form or another, and there's no good stopping point, so one ends up thinking "Okay, just one more chapter...just gotta collect a few more Galleons...brew one more potion...holy crap, where did those three hours go?!" I suspect that the main draw of Pottermore is the sorting and wand-selection. I was hoping to be sorted as a Ravenclaw, but I ended up as a Gryffindor, which, okay. I consider myself much more diffident and clever than brave and idealistic, but, hey, I get to hang out with the main characters, and our Quidditch team is pretty good. My wand is ebony and phoenix feather, 10 inches, hard, which apparently means that I'm *deep breath* an inflexible, short, non-conformist, unique, detached idealist who's good at combat magic and Transfiguration. I guess I can see this, although it wouldn't have been my initial description of myself. But, hey, there's that Stark/Tyrell conflict again: I have ideals, but I don't get too fussed about every little thing. My username is HeartBronze18858 if any of y'all want to add me; so far the only people I know on there are
hamsterwoman and The Roomie (who, of course, is over the moon about Pottermore finally being open to us commoners, and texted me at 9 AM on Saturday with her username).And last but not least: meme time! Yet another non-character one, but another sort of general fandom/RL one. We'll be back to geekier fare soon, though, never fear.
1) What is your favorite item that you own?
Practical item: my laptop. Sleekerton, the current incarnation (in conjunction with Skippyjon, my iPhone) pretty much owns/runs my life. It’s pretty much the center of my professional and, er, fangirly lives, and lays a claim to a good portion of my social and academic lives as well. I spend more time than I’d like to admit on it (in fact, I’m typing on it right now), and I’m fairly certain that I’d be in all kinds of trouble without it.
Sentimental item: my copy (copies? One book in three volumes, anyway) of The Lord of the Rings. The cover art isn’t the prettiest, their front and back covers are only held on by several layers of increasingly elderly tape, the pages are yellowed, dog-eared, and covered in mysterious stains (I’m an incorrigible reader at tables), and random pages are marked by bits of tissues and ticket stubs for no apparent reason. Perfection, right? They’ve travelled to the UK/Ireland twice, Australia once, New York once, and Oklahoma three or four times. Aside from being my favorite work of fiction ever, the physical books themselves are important to me, as they’ve stuck with me for the last decade or so, and have seen me through quite a bit.
2) What is the last movie that you’ve seen?
Iron Man 2, with M on Monday.* My Angry Feminist™ issues with it are too severe for me to call it my favorite Avengers-verse movie (before The Avengers itself comes out, anyway), but I think it is the best executed. The special effects are extremely impressive, RDJ was perfectly cast, and the villains and tech were a hell of a lot of fun (although M and I occasionally indulged our inner twelve-year-olds by re-dubbing all of Justin Hammer’s dialogue with “douche,” with the occasional “I’m a douche” thrown in for variety. Why, yes, we are worldly and sophisticated college students attending one of the most prestigious universities in the United States).
* = written before the weekend.
3) If you could be one fictional character, who would you be?
Ooh, tough one (as always)! For the moment, I’m going to have to go with Merry Brandybuck. His life is a good blend of hobbity pleasantness and ease, and Tookish excitement. Speaking of Tookishness, his journey isn’t quite as harrowing as Frodo’s and Sam’s but he’s cannier and less flaily than Pippin. His greatest personal losses are the death of Théoden and Frodo and later Sam going to the Undying Lands. He participates in the slaying of the Witch-King of Angmar, gets made a Knight of Rohan, hangs out with Ents, sees some of the last Elves, and just generally achieves a perfect balance between interestingness and peace.
4) Describe your room as well as you can.
For the moment, I share a double dorm with The Roomie. My half of the room is the left-hand side as you enter. Directly across from the (thick, heavy, and prone to sticking) door is a large window that takes up most of the far wall, out of which I can see People’s Park, most of the city of Berkeley, a good portion of the San Francisco Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, and San Francisco itself off to the left. Directly under the window is a pair of desks, the left one of which is mine. My portable (well, for a certain value of “portable,” anyway) wireless printer/scanner/copier is rather buried under two stacks of books: one of leisure (ha!) reading, one of textbooks. My desk itself has various bits of detritus, such as a tiny Christmas stocking left over from last year, a baggie containing burned discs of the first season of Babylon 5, a mini stapler, some colored post-it tabs, and assorted cables and chargers. My alarm clock, earplugs, lamp, and laptop, in that order from back to front, are set up as to be best used from my bed, directly to the left of my desk. The bed itself is narrow and long. The fitted sheet is red flannel, and the sheet and pillowcase are blue flannel. The comforter is sort of a light tan on the underside, and a darker brown on top. It could use a wash. At the moment, my pillow is replaced by one of those big pillows with armrests, this one a light blue plush, which protects my back from being poked from the headboard, which consists of two posts and a rail. The left-hand wall of the room, which is mine, is decorated with bunches of dried lavender, posters (a map of Middle-Earth, another one of Beleriand, a Temeraire one that came with my boxed set, and a rather cat-mauled one of white and orange tiger cubs playing), a schedule of my classes, four miniature paintings (two Van Gough reproductions, one Monet reproduction, and one my mom did in Italy), a photo of H and I as wee ones making faces on our elementary school soccer field, and three necklaces (a green d20 with gold numbers in a wire cage that H gave to all her bridesmaids [yes, it was that kind of wedding], a totally-not-a-TARDIS-key and miniature rose charm on a chain that H gave to me when I left for England, and a bronze owl with onyx eyes that J recently brought me back from Israel). In my corner not taken up by my bed, which is right up against the wall, there’s a mirror, under which is a little dresser that I use to store sweaters, scarves, etc. On top are what toiletries I don’t keep in the bathroom: contact case, contact cleaner, hairbrush, body splash, vitamins, hand lotion, water bottle, and, rather inexplicably, two plates and a full set of silverware. Don’t ask. My closet is on the other side of the wall that divides our room from the hall, and contains a much larger dresser where I keep my actual clothes, with shoes that I don’t wear everyday (boots, nice sandals, flats, and plastic flip-flops for the shower). My heavy coat and robe are on hangars in the other half of the closet, as is the giant box I moved in with. There’s a shelf running the length of the top couple of feet of the closet, where I keep detergent, my hat, and snacks of various kinds. My netted laundry bag hangs on one of the many hooks on the back of my closet. My towel hangs on the bar of the closet door. There’s an Amazon box on the floor by the little dresser that has been repurposed to store whatever notebooks I don’t need on any particular day, and my most often worn shoes (slippers and sneakers) are between the little dresser and my bed. There’s a scale under my bed, because I’ve discovered a tendency to get plump if I eat too much Berkeley food. There are also two long drawers built into/under my bed. The top drawer is filled with my own stuff: some fiction waiting to be read, some reference books, some DVDs (mostly BBC-generated), my Tolkien (of course), and a couple of bookmarks. The bottom drawer is where I keep all of my textbooks that aren’t needed for the moment, as well as receipts for said textbooks, so I can sell them back and return the rented ones at the end of the semester. Whew! I think that’s everything. (Oh, and my desk is full of office supplies, official documents that I might need, etc.)
5) What do you typically wear?
I’m usually a fairly boring dresser. Jeans, t-shirt (preferably nerdy in some capacity), sneakers (New Balance), and a hoodie/sweater if it’s cold. I might on occasion mix it up with long floofy skirts instead of jeans, or flats/boots instead of sneakers, but generally I stick with the basics.
6) What do you order on a pizza?
Pineapple and olives, and maybe sausage, depending on how greasy/spicy the sausage is at whatever place I’m ordering from.
7) How good are your teeth?
Pretty damn good! I’ve never had a cavity, but I have had to have my teeth sanded down on occasion due to chipping (yes, it felt weird). But in general, I’m very happy that my teeth give me so little trouble.
8) How long have you had your LiveJournal?
*checks* Since October 2007. Wow, it really has been a while! Just out of curiosity, I went back to read my first post, and it was about baking cookies and Nightwish getting a new singer. Huh.
9) What’s the one thing that changed your life the most?
Moving to Sebastopol, I think. It goes without saying that my friends and memories would have been entirely different if we had stayed in Vacaville, St. Helena, or Australia, but living in the country outside a small Northern California town has pretty much made my life what it is. My parents divorced at least in part because my dad was always working on some vineyard half a day’s drive away, and so was never home, but pretty much everywhere else, he managed wineries within walking distance, or at worst only a ten-minute drive. Because we live way the hell out in the country, there weren’t any other kids that lived near us growing up, so I was kind of lonely a lot of the time, which led to me having a lot of free time, which led to me spending that time reading, which led to, um, this. And by “this,” I mean my generally fangirly nature.
10) How long did your longest relationship last?
Almost three years. Well, two and a half, anyway. Actually, funny story about this: when we had been together for about a year, J and I realized that our anniversary was coming up, but neither of us could remember the date. Basically, our conversation went like:
J: So when’s our anniversary? We should do something.
Me: Hell if I know. Wasn’t it somewhere around the Apple Blossom Parade (annual event, huge for my high school because our marching band led the parade)? But, yeah, we should probably do something.
J: Aren’t girls supposed to keep track of these things?
Me: *shrug*
Yes, we were that kind of couple.
11) What do you ship the most?
I’m pretty sure this is asking what my main OTPs are, so I’ll go with Renly/Loras, Charles/Erik, Billy/Teddy, and Amy/Rory, at least for the moment.
12) How many people do you have in your phone’s address book?
A nice, round 80, as it turns out. Wow. I didn't think I knew so many people (although how many of those people’s info is still good is uncertain.)
13) A stranger grants you a box with a button inside, and informs you that you have 24 hours to press the button, although you do not have to. If you choose to do so, then one person that you do not know will die. But, you will receive one million dollars. Do you press the button? (The Box reference)
Nope. I’m not that hard up for money, at least not yet.
14) What is your top played song on Last.fm? (If you do not have Last.fm, then iTunes).
iTunes, because I am an iWhore: “Voodoo Child,” by Rogue Traders. I first heard it on Doctor Who, but it eventually became the unofficial anthem for my D&D group (although it did have to share that title with “Never Split the Party,” by Emerald Rose, or alternatively here, as illustrated by AtLA, Dresden Files, LotR, The Mummy, and The Road to El Dorado). We are enormous nerds, if you haven’t figured that out yet.
15) What movie have you watched the most?
In recent years, certainly the LotR trilogy, but overall, probably either the Disney or Erroll Flynn version of Robin Hood, which I literally used to watch five or six times a week, when I was a wee one.
16) What’s one song that defines how you feel right now?
I don’t know if “stuck in my head” counts as “feels like,” but I’m rather liking "Vater Unser," by E Nomine. It came up on my iPod on my way back from San Francisco Saturday night, and it’s one of those songs that automatically makes the listener feel like a badass, regardless of what they actually happen to be doing at the time. It lends itself to striding.
17) If you could tell one girl something right now, what would it be?
Real:
hamsterwoman: thanks for a great night out! One of the many reasons I’m glad I chose Cal over UCLA is that I’ve got a fandom-buddy within travelling distance, a fact which lends itself to many conversations about things like 90s TV shows and the interrelations between Discworld, Dragaera, the Dresden Files, and AOSIAF. Also, thanks for feeding and/or inducing my various addictions. XDFictional: Hermione Granger: stick with those two idiots, especially the red-headed one. I’m not saying they get any less dumb, but they do get more interesting and generally nicer.
18) If you could tell one boy something right now, what would it be?
Real: P: I’m really glad that you're enjoying your English class, but do you really want to take a minor in it? You change your major/career path every six months anyway, so if you’re going to take a minor, make sure it’s something that you’ll stick with. Also, you know that I'm always happy to talk to you, but I'm not a thesaurus, and texting works just as well as calling for "give me a word for this specific weird emotion/reaction for my ENGL 1B paper."
Fictional: Magneto: how can someone be so smart and so stupid at the same time? Here’s a hint: if your family reunions only happen if you kidnap half the participants and contain threats of dismemberment, you’re doing something wrong. (Also, you really, really could have picked a better time to dump your boyfriend. In fact, you shouldn’t have dumped him at all, for obvious reasons as well as the fact that you ended up joining, and even occasionally leading, the X-Men, so you stomping off in a huff didn’t do as much good as you thought.)
19) If your emotions were people, who do you think you’d be best friends with?
Contentment would make an excellent roommate, I guess, although Fangirly Glee and I would go out for drinks a couple of nights a week.
20) Ask one TMI question.
What’s that smell? (The answer rarely makes the smell any better, and is just as rarely anything other than embarrassing.)
21) What are you most passionate about?
Various fandoms and/or pairings, mostly. The closest things I have to IRL Causes are same-sex marriage/gay rights and animal rights. TBH, though, I’m much more active in my fangirly passions than IRL ones, as in I can give you a longer (and quicker) list of reasons why Tolkien is one of the greatest authors of the 20th century or why genre literature deserves academic attention than why this or that political/social change should be made, why X viewpoint is right/wrong/*ist, etc.
22) How would you describe your frequency to being horny?
I don’t know what an average frequency is or anything, but subjectively speaking, not all that often. The lack of any kind of relationship in which sex is a possibility for the past few years probably has something to do with this; I’m used to it by now.
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no subject
Date: 2012-04-17 07:54 am (UTC)Glad you were able to read "In Autumn"! My thoughts on it were quite similar, and I too especially was amused by Lien's interaction with the French dragons.
Anybody can be snarky and witty and independent-minded and feminist when raised in a cloistered subculture that highly values all those traits, whereas her being all these things, and using them to overcome more conformist and/or narrow-minded opponents in a society that just wants her to be meek, docile, and stupid, is, IMO, a much more spectacular victory, and one much more deserving of praise
Very well put! (Though I'm still going to go look at that fanart, of course :) But, anyway, yeah, I think Lizzie is better off being one of those society ladies whom Jane Roland would be pleasantly surprised to meet and find that there are strong women not only in the Corps.
but if I didn't know the flavor was Guinness beforehand, I wouldn't have been able to tell
Same! It was overall pleasant, but, yeah, I wouldn't have been able to identify the flavor in a million years.
ebony and phoenix feather
Sounds very exotic!
a green d20 with gold numbers in a wire cage that H gave to all her bridesmaids
I don't even play D&D, but that is awesome!
thanks for a great night out! One of the many reasons I’m glad I chose Cal over UCLA is that I’ve got a fandom-buddy within travelling distance,
Awww! :DDD You are very welcome! And I was just reflecting the other day that I was very glad you'd chosen Cal over UCLA for this very reason, and that I will greatly miss hanging out with you when you are in grad school at UCLA. And thank you for the Sherlock introduction, in turn! :D (Also, hee, I'm pleased to be in Hermione's company on that question :)
no subject
Date: 2012-04-17 10:24 pm (UTC)IKR? I mean, it's obvious that it was written at the very last second and never proofred, but seriously? Misspelling the author's name twice and the main character's name five times? I'm actually a little impressed.
I too especially was amused by Lien's interaction with the French dragons.
The French dragons were great! One moment that I loved but forgot to mention was when one of them (I forget which) brought her a branch of some sort because he thought it was pretty and would please her, but she just sighed and facepalmed again because, seriously, who brings someone a branch? XD
Though I'm still going to go look at that fanart, of course :) But, anyway, yeah, I think Lizzie is better off being one of those society ladies whom Jane Roland would be pleasantly surprised to meet and find that there are strong women not only in the Corps.
Exactly. I'd still love to see a mutually pleasantly surprised meeting between these two, but more in the context you mention than being aviators together. That said, you should absolutely go take a look at the fanart, which is gorgeous!
I don't even play D&D, but that is awesome!
It really was. The best part is, green and gold were the colors of the bridesmaids' dresses! We are some classy nerds.
I will greatly miss hanging out with you when you are in grad school at UCLA.
Me, too! I really wish that UCLA was in NorCal, not SoCal, as LA is horrible and polluted and muggy for a good portion of the year, and the vast majority of my friends and family are up here. :(
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Date: 2012-04-18 04:25 am (UTC)The best part is, green and gold were the colors of the bridesmaids' dresses! We are some classy nerds.
That makes it even better, you're right! :D
It's hard for SoCal to compete with NorCal. All of my friends from LA who went to school at Berkeley ended up staying in the Bay Area, and who can blame them. Well, at least it's close enough that you could come home frequently to the good part of the state. :P
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Date: 2012-04-19 03:17 am (UTC)I thoroughly sympathize re the Jane 'Austin' group project debacle. One of the things I hated about being a student was Group Projects. I always bitched (eloquently) about them to professors and administrators. They are four times as much work for me as a solitary paper where I just do all the research and writing myself. I guess Group Projects are how they get us ready for the RL workplace.
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Date: 2012-04-19 09:43 pm (UTC)Yay! However many you want to do is great, but that's the nice thing about memes like these: you can just answer a question or two whenever you have five minutes (which, for people like you and me, is actually pretty rare), and you can post them in chunks as you finish them. I'm really glad you're doing them, though, as I'd love to see your answers!
They are four times as much work for me as a solitary paper where I just do all the research and writing myself. I guess Group Projects are how they get us ready for the RL workplace.
Ugh, yes. With group projects, there are a million things to coordinate, and you always have to worry about someone's feelings getting hurt...solo projects are so much better! And the whole group project aspect is actually one of the reasons I'm dreading entering the workforce full time. *crawls back under
Internetrock*