worryingly jolly batman

( sga: midway )

*sigh* I have to go back to CHCH tomorrow and I'm packing and it's like, WHY DO I HAVE SO MUCH CRAP? Shoot me now. *procrastinates*

So I was talking to sixth_light just now about packing (because she's going away with the whanau for a month in like, April) and I realised why packing is so tough for me. it's not that I have so many t-shirts and pairs of jeans or dresses or whatever. Actually, I got most of those in one suitcase - the smaller suitcase. The other suitcase was shoes, always bulky, and jackets. Jackets are my big packing problem! Why, you ask? Well, they're bulky and don't really compress down like jeans and t-shirts do; like jeans, you wear them every day, but unlike jeans you need lots of different jackets for different occasions, seasons, and outfits; and, well, I have a lot of them.

I would take photos, but they're all packed now. But these are the jackets and coats I own, in order of frequency of wear:

Big, long black winter coat.
Short tailored black jacket.
Other tailored black jacket.
OTHER tailored black jacket (with short sleeves.)
Brown very light jacket with short sleeves - this is really not a jacket in the warmer sense.
New brown funky jacket that I don't know when I'll wear because it's totally unlike anything I own.
Stripey suit jacket.
Red light-weather short overcoat.
Tailored grey jacket with orange stripes (little thin ones, super-cute).
My ski coat.
Big long super-swirly semi-victorian grey patterned GORGEOUS coat. Which I ADORE.

And I love them all - and they're not really interchangeable (not even the black ones, honest!) or anything! *twitch* *twitch*

asdfghj I officially can't fit my big blue beautiful Complete Angel box set. :'(

OH GOD IT'S 11. I STARTED WRITING THIS AT SEVEN AND I'M STILL NOT DONE.

*spams* Hey gang, I recently reshuffled all my music so it's, like, all in the same place. Is there any way I can get WMP and iTunes to go through and figure out where all the new stuff is and where all the old stuff isn't, without actually reinstalling both or either?

ETA: ah-ha! Dunno about iTunes but if you hit F3 in the library tab in WMP you can add and update media information by selecting location. \o/

Okay, so I know what you all want to read desperately right now: me, struggling with my timetable for next year, and my plans for the year after that.

So for the past two or so years I've been doing a BA/BSc majoring in english, philosophy and mathematics, respectively. (Actually, the BA was originally in linguistics, but it kind of bored me so I switched.) After two years, this is what I have that's relevant (I also have some french and a little extra linguistics, but who cares):

LING/ENGL101: Int. to the English Language
ENGL1something: Shakespeare
ENGL2something: Nineteenth Century Environments

PHIL134: Logic
PHIL208: Logic A
PHIL209: Logic B
LING/PHILsomething: Semantics
PHIl233: Epistemology and Metaphysics

MATH105: Mathematics 1A or 1B or something, anyway, it's a double paper and it's pretty much all you need from first year maths
MATH221/222: (making one full paper) Algebra and Cryptography, and Groups and Symmetry

To graduate with my stated majors, I probably need to spend at least two and a half more years in my undergraduate degree. So my question to you, dear friends (and I would really appreciate advice in this, actually): is it worth it? To spend nearly five years on an undergraduate degree, burn out on what I really like doing, and then spend another however many years getting a postgrad degree at Victoria? And then probably go somewhere else and get some more education? Or would it be smarter to cut my degree down to a BA in Philosophy and English, uproot from Canty and head up to Victoria to do postgrad in 2008? Maybe finish off my undergrad Maths at the same time? (this mostly seems attractive to me because - home in wellington! creative writing programme! good philosophy!) one other thing, I don't even know if I can do that this year. I've totally overloaded on papers every year so I should theoretically, but --

( and a little bit on which papers I'm thinking about taking. )

Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is a lot of pointless blether about nothing whatsoever. Suck it up, most of it's under a cut.

Also, interesting fact: I've started to have anxiety nightmares about being late for work. I've had nightmares every night this week and it's really starting to stress me out, because they leave me tired enough that I... sleep in, and am late for work. In my defense, I start work at seven am most mornings, which means I have to be out of the house by half past six. it's not hard for me to be late. But... eh. it's creepy because I've never had nightmares like this before! And on that note I'm going the hell to bed.

Rec! (God, when was the last time I rec'd anything? I am a bad fangirl, anyway)

Highway is for Gamblers, by monkeycrackmary. SPN, gen, R (disturbing content, although no more than the show itself). It's gen, so you all can read it. Remember The Benders, you know, that psychotically disturbing episode from S1? This ties up some loose ends from that. It really got me where I live, which you can tell by the way that I'm getting off my ass to rec it. Go! Read!


And now, a little slapstick: This evening we watched the first episode of Torchwood (!!!!). We couldn't get a quick download of the second episode, so we planned on watching it the next morning and went our separate ways (bedrooms, boyfriends, etc). I did a few dishes and started watching The Breakfast Club, at the same time starting to download the first episode of the second season of Grey's Anatomy. About midnight, I paused the movie and found a direct download of Torchwood episode two (!!!!) Naturally I grabbed it and it told me it had two hours to go. I contemplated sleeping.

Yeah, that wasn't ever going to happen.

I finish TBC and go to check on Grey's - it's done, and Torchwood should be downloaded in about forty minutes. PERFECT, thinks I. But as I open up Grey's, something strikes me - this seems awfull familiar. I check the filename and oh, wait, somehow I've downloaded 1x06. Which I've already watched. Go, me! Oh, well, says I, it's not so bad, I can play solitaire and browse LJ until Torchwood gets here. So about half an hour later it's ten past two or so and I check the download and... wait for it... it's fucking shorted out at fucking ninety percent with fucking twelve minutes and SEVEN FUCKING SECONDS to go.

*hurls things*

So then I had to wait for my internet connection to fix and then restart which means from the beginning, since I'm too idiotic to use a download manager. *sobs brokenly* I'm actually kind of pissed off, because lately I've been noticing that the net cuts out for about twenty minutes at two am every morning - about the time we switch from onpeak to offpeak. This makes downloading overnight totally useless and sincerely pisses me off. People in the know: is it worth contacting my ISP (iHug, for the record) about this?

Also: does anyone know if there's new Heroes this week? Also also, baseball fucking sucks, I want my House and Bones. :-(

Every time I walk past a Lush shop, I feel like the most ridiculous sort of girly-girl. I have in the past happily washed with Budget shampoo and conditioner, I've never dyed my hair, I cut it about once a year and blowdry every twelvth of never, I don't own moisturiser or any kind of hand or foot cream and as far as skincare goes I have a gel cleanser I never use. I do use liquid soap and I do try for something that smells good and I have been using the same type of shampoo and conditioner for nearly two years now, but that's the extent of my investment in the girly luxuries. I'm just way too lazy for anything else.

But Lush absolutely destroys me. For a very long time, for various reasons, I had almost no sense of smell. That got fixed a few years back, but for awhile in there Lush products were some of the few really great smells I could, well, smell. Now that I can actually smell them properly? oh my god take me now.

That said! Sometimes, my favourite thing about Lush is what you can tell about the people who buy them. For example, my mother just bought me two samples of Wow Wow mask, a big pot of Coconut and Almond Smoothie (which smells more like peanut butter Jelly Bellies to me, but hey), a tub of Marilyn (chamomile designed to smooth your hair and, with regular use, make it lighter; smells like beeswax. So yummy.), a bar of the citrus-y Happy, and one of You Snap the Whip.

From which I deduce! My mother wants me to be more assertive (I'm not sure you get much more assertive than me), have more "wow", be more happy, and... be like Marilyn Monroe. Which, I don't know, suicidal and married to Arthur Miller? Good call, mum. However, it all smells so great I don't really give a damn.

My life for the past few days has been defined by a sort of... temporal dislocation. When my dad came to pick me up on Thursday, it was the 28th of September. However, as related elsewhere, I was operating under the impression it was the 28th of October - the day before his birthday, so I baked him a birthday cake. The cake was damn good, mind you, but: "Isn't it your birthday tomorrow? ... no? ... It's not October?"

Then today I realised that it's not the last week of lectures! No, that's next week! This is excellent news.

( ahahaha yet another essay left til the last possible minute )

ETA 2: OH YEAH, I have an argument!

"Does romantic poetry accurately represent the non-human world, or does it drastically misrepresent it? Support your argument with an analysis of two poems."

"The nurse, the guide, the guardian of my heart": Nature as female in the poetry of William Wordsworth.

Although Wordsworth strives to faithfully describe the environment that surrounds him, his poems betray an inability to escape preconceived notions of nature as female, ultimately leading to distortions in his depictions of the non-human world. By exploring the language of "Nutting" and "Lines Written A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey", it can be seen that Wordsworth's formulation of nature as female leads inexorably to descriptions of an environment that exists only in response to the poet's needs and desires; and environment, even, which Wordsworth appears to feed on, both literally in the case of "Nutting" and metaphorically in the case of "Tintern Abbey."

Okay, that's not a thesis, that's a title and the first two sentences of my introduction. Woo woo? Actually, gah, it doesn't quite say what I want it to say, it doesn't quite answer the question, so we'll see, it might change.

He gave out a whole bunch of essay advice, some of which was great, and some of which was kind of blah. But what really struck me was, he said only draft a provisional introduction and come back and do it again after you've finished. I do usually revise my introduction a bit, mostly because I end up leaving stuff out (I'm... talky) but, gah, I can't write *anything* until I have a really good introduction. Man.

ETA3: okay okay the rest of my blether is going to go below a cut and y'all won't have to see it but this is *fascinating*. Wordsworth published (and, according to Wiki anyway, wrote) Tintern Abbey in 1798. Here he describes the natural world as "The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse/The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul/Of all my moral being." He also wrote that

...Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us...

Now, in the same year Immanuel Kant published his "Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View", where he writes: "Nature made women mature early and had them demand gentle and polite treatment from men, so that … [men] would find themselves brought, if not quite to morality itself, then at least to that which cloaks it, moral behaviour, which is the preparation and introduction to morality." The "beautiful understanding" or finer feelings that women (supposedly) have (Kant was very into finer feelings, "the beautiful and the sublime") actually leads men on to higher moral feeling.

The similarities are fascinating. I mean, Kant was publishing in German and although he was a pretty influential philosopher, even during his lifetime, I have no idea whether Wordsworth would have read his work. But whether he did or not, the similarities are striking: Wordsworth writes that nature leads men on to higher feelings and gives them a moral compass; Kant thinks women do the same thing. It's just so interesting.

*geeks out*

( what's the opposite of progress? )

Last semester's marks:

Logic A: A+
My verdict: totally deserved, I loved that course and I worked reasonably hard. I'm still stoked, though, because while I got 100% for my first 50% test, the second 50% test (which I must have got at least... 35, 40% of) was really bizarrely formatted, so I had no idea what to expect. So, yeah, I'm pleased.

Epistemology and Metaphysics: A
My verdict: Hm, I could have done with another A+, but I guess I can't complain. Can't help wondering if that essay had been a little better... but meh.

Algebra and Cryptography: A-
My verdict: I'm disappointed, actually. I did at least A, often better, in all the tests and assignments, and I didn't find the exam overly difficult. I dunno, I feel like I knew the course material better than that. However, it could be because I missed a lot of my tutorials; I kind of want my exam script back now...

French: B
My verdict: AHAHAHA okay, I'm actually really pleased because considering I hated the course, skipped half my classes and assessments and did an absolutely horrible oral I was seriously expecting to flunk, so, yay!

This semester's courses:

I was originally planning on taking Logic B, Semantics, Children's Literature and a history paper. However...
-I need more maths for my degree
-Children's literature clashes with Logic B
- I went to my semantics lecture today and it looks seriously boring

So my possible remodel looks either like this:
Logic B, MATH221 (groups & systems), semantics, and either nineteenth century environments or seventeenth century writing
OR
Logic B, MATH221, nineteenth century environments AND seventeenth century writing.

If anyone wants to cast a vote on which way they think I should go, please to do so as I am seriously stuck and need to make up my mind ASAP.

Pros for semantics: it's a logic-based course, and I normally adore logic. It's also a linguistics course on the meaning of words, which I also normally find interesting. I have a solid background in both logic and linguistics; I'm good at them both, too, so this has the potential to be an easy pass.
Cons for semantics: The class today was kind of dull. I might keep going for a couple of weeks to see if it improves.

Pros for nineteenth century environments: I went today and it looks really good, the lecturer seems interesting and so does the course material, which is basically about the development of environmentalist poetry, prose and non-fiction in the nineteenth century as a response to things like the industrial revolution. We get to study Frankenstein, Tess of the d'Urbervlles and the Hunting of the Snark, along with Charles Darwin and a whole slew of poets. I'm interested in environmentalism and I don't really know much about the nineteenth century but hey, Darwin!
Cons for nineteenth century environments: it looks like a crapload of reading and a lot of work. But... I think I might enjoy both, so.

Pros for the seventeenth century: king & country: I haven't been to a lecture yet (trying tomorrow) but I had one of the lecturers last year for my Shakespeare course and he was great. I know a fair bit about the (early) seventeenth century and it was a pretty interesting period. I'd quite like to study Milton because I know I'll never read him otherwise. And apparently we do a lot of seventeenth century poetry, which I think would be really satisfying; I love studying poetry (this is also a pro for C19th.)
Cons for the seventeenth century: if I don't take it, I have my Tuesdays off. Um, yeah, I would quite like that. :P It, too, looks like a lot of reading. I'd be doing three 22-pt 200 level papers and one 11-pt 200 level, which I'd be doing anyway, but I have a feeling Semantics might be an easy pass and this one definitely wouldn't be. *sigh*

ETA: also, what, are all the universities releasing their results today or something? crazy, kids. And congratulations to flist who seem to be doing very well indeed. :)

Mmm, so, I'm on holiday for three weeks. And when I left I thought "right, so, I'm going to do tonnes of writing! Really!"

... yeah, I know, kiss of death. ( fanfiction and me, 2006 )

I'm also still looking for a beta for that Jonathon Strange and Mr Norrell tidbit... *flutters eyelashes* I'm a really grateful beta-ee, honest!

Was also going to talk about the new Doctor, but I can summarise it quickly: much enjoyed, will be there next week. :P

I've claimed the Young Wizards general series for fanfic100. I fondly await my approaching insanity, and here is my Big Damn Table.

001.	Beginnings.	002.	Middles.	003.	Ends.	004.	Insides.	005.	Outsides.
006.	Hours.	007.	Days.	008.	Weeks.	009.	Months.	010.	Years.
011.	Red.	012.	Orange.	013.	Yellow.	014.	Green.	015.	Blue.
016.	Purple.	017.	Brown.	018.	Black.	019.	White.	020.	Colourless.
021.	Friends.	022.	Enemies.	023.	Lovers.	024.	Family.	025.	Strangers.
026.	Teammates.	027.	Parents.	028.	Children.	029.	Birth.	030.	Death(s)
031.	Sunrise.	032.	Sunset.	033.	Too Much.	034.	Not Enough.	035.	Sixth Sense.
036.	Smell.	037.	Sound.	038.	Touch.	039.	Taste.	040.	Sight.
041.	Shapes.	042.	Triangle.	043.	Square.	044.	Circle.	045.	Moon.
046.	Star.	047.	Heart.	048.	Diamond.	049.	Club.	050.	Spade.
051.	Water.	052.	Fire.	053.	Earth.	054.	Air.	055.	Spirit.
056.	Breakfast.	057.	Lunch.	058.	Dinner.	059.	Food.	060.	Drink.
061.	Winter.	062.	Spring.	063.	Summer.	064.	Fall.	065.	Passing.
066.	Rain.	067.	Snow.	068.	Lightening.	069.	Thunder.	070.	Storm.
071.	Broken	072.	Fixed.	073.	Light.	074.	Dark.	075.	Shade.
076.	Who?	077.	What?	078.	Where?	079.	When?	080.	Why?
081.	How?	082.	If.	083.	And.	084.	He.	085.	She.
086.	Choices.	087.	Life.	088.	School.	089.	Work.	090.	Home.
091.	Birthday.	092.	Christmas.	093.	Thanksgiving.	094.	Independence.	095.	New Year.
096.	Writer‘s Choice.	097.	Writer‘s Choice.	098.	Writer‘s Choice.	099.	Writer‘s Choice.	100.	Writer‘s Choice.

I just found out that Shoebox Project part 23 was posted in August I can't believe I missed it, and I just read it and. and. and.

I'm kind of sort of crying. OH GOD WHY AM I A PUPPYSHIPPER IT ALL BREAKS MY HEART IN THE END, YOU KNOW THE BITS WITH AZKABAN AND ARCHES AND HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE DEATH.

*sob*