worryingly jolly batman

So, last night I pulled a horrendous all-nighter in order to finish my book design scrapbook - I am much better at cutting things out using crop than I am using scissors, so I did mine on the internets and you can see if you are interested in knowing what (other than the usual) has been making me crazy for the last week: bookdesign_project.

I must be getting older, because the last time I pulled an all-nighter I was basically a bit slow the next day but nothing too serious. Today I was like, becoming hysterical with laughter-verging-on-tears at the drop of a hat - e.g. I started telling one classmate about the folios (page numbers) in Knitting Rules I was so ANGRY and yet so AMUSED because they are BAD but in a FUNNY WAY, so I was like, LAUGH SHOUTING. It was fucking horrible. (It didn't help that I hadn't eaten since about 3am and then it was like, salami and camembert, not exactly a full meal.) I was taking those folios really damn personally.

So anyway, although I had been going to go and hang out with ex-English-classmates Matt and Sarah in our regular Monday gig that I have missed for the past month and it was even my turn to pick the movie (speaking of which:
) But instead, I went home. I thought: I have to finish Wolf Hall for book group on Wednesday. I thought: hey, I have two volumes of Scott Pilgrim to read and return to caramarie. I thought: hey, I have fic I'm in the middle of writing. I thought: hey, how about cleaning some of the things?

Well. I did manage to put on a load of washing. But otherwise, this is what I did between 4 and 8pm today (not in that order):
1. Gave senri a lot of probably ill-thought-out advice in what would have been high-pitched tones if we were speaking IRL but instead just lots of caps and swearing
2. Baked a loaf of white bread, a loaf of cheese bread (but I forgot the paprika so it was dull), and giant nutella chocolate chip cookies; prepared and froze World Peace Cookies for my next biscuit emergency, but I forgot to put in the chocolate chips so they probably won't do their job; and improvised Almost Vegetarian Spring/Summerish Rolls for dinner.

Y'all, I don't live alone, but my flatmates are in Japan right now. That's a LOT of baking. What was I THINKING? (It's not actually that crazy: I'm pretty seriously broke right now and I need to get back into the swing of packing lunches, and baking is awesome at making me actually want to do that.) BUT ALL THAT IN LIKE FOUR HOURS. Less because of my time out to shout at sushiflop (and confidential to you, bb, we are friends on DW! But will I call you Senri or Sushiflop now? SO HARD.) SO MANIC. SO SO MANIC.

Anyway, I have this whole resolution that I can't remember if I told you guys about or not, but the resolution was: I am tired of having to google and regoogle every time I want to make the same recipe twice or having to re-make-up the same dish over and over again. I'M WRITING THIS SHIT DOWN. on my journal because have you seen my handwriting? So here have some recipes.

( cheese bread ) I ate two pieces lovely and warm and the rest is sitting in slices in the freezer now. I have never tried freezing it before, but I'm not too worried.

( white bread ) I slightly undercooked this, I think, and then I cut into it too soon, so half of it is in strangely-shaped slices and the other half is sitting there waiting too cool down and have a starring role in a freezer bag.

I'm skipping the nutella cookies because I've now been working on this post for an hour and a half and that's DUMB. (I was doing other stuff too plus still tired.) And I want to sleep. Got the recipe here on youtube and the woman says nutella in the FUNNIEST way. I can't tell if she's being ironic or not.

But I do want to put down what I did with the Weirdo Rolls.

Tui's Lazy-Ass Vege-Based But Not Actually Vegetarian Dinner: Egg and Carrot Rice Paper Winter Rolls
( read more )

Guys, I need some help. I'm writing about how web pages and books are structured differently. It's really easy to give examples for non-fiction (I'm probably going to talk about feminism 101 and TV tropes) but I'm really struggling to think of examples for fiction, especially narrative fiction, because all of the best examples I can think of are, of course, fanfiction. I'd really like to find some stuff that demonstrates flexible narration, like Crysothemis' Fix or Cesperanza's Scrabble; I'd also really like something like Catherynne M. Valente's The Girl who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making that includes links to all parts (instead of just before and after parts) on each page, like most Big Bang fics do, for example. (I feel like before and after merely replicate the structure of the conventional book.)

I hate feminism.

Also Arthur Ransome, Enid Blyton, Margaret Mahy, and Diana Wynne Jones.

I don't like girls. Or adventure fiction. Or motherly roles.

Actually, I really just never want to think about the 10000 words I've written ever, ever again.

Unfortunately, they need editing. And referencing. And also, hey! An introduction and conclusion.

Hey, why doesn't one of y'all just shoot me?

I seriously SERIOUSLY am so over this. I have only written ONE essay this year that wasn't in some way about the portrayal of women in young adult fiction and while, OK, I love women and young adult fiction CAN I PLEASE JUST WRITE ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE NOW KTHXBYE. I never ever thought I would say this but THANK FUCKING GOD for Barthes.

I generally do not subscribe to psychoanalytic literary criticism, but I'm only so strong.

Then George appeared, flying out of the door like the wind, to rescue her beloved Timothy. She rushed to the to [fighting] dogs and tried to pull Timmy away. Her father yelled at her.
      "Come away, you little idiot! Don't you know better than to separate two fighting dogs with your bare hands? Where's the garden hose?"
     It was fixed to a tap nearby. Julian ran to it and turned on the tap. he picked up the hose and turned it on the two dogs. At once the jet of water spurted out at them, and they leapt apart in surprised. Julian saw Edgar standing near, and couldn't resist swinging the hose a little so that the boy was soaked.

- Enid Blyton, Five Run Away Together (16-17)

[English major] In this passage George, supposedly "as good as any boy", and a dogowner herself, ineffectually attempts to separate two dogs. Her efforts are quickly rejected by her father, while her male cousin Julian is able to effectively use a spurting hose to succeed where George cannot. A psychoanalytic assessment of this passage is almost irresistible; Julian's spurting hose symbolises the male sex organs he shares with George's father, rendering them able to deal with violence, while George's tender-hearted nature (and, despite her gender play, female organs) render her incapable to do anything but fuss ineffectually. Yet psychoanalysis is not necessary to create a similar reading of this passage. Julian repeatedly exerts a kind of patriarchal authority throughout the series: for example in this novel, his interactions with Mrs. Stick, (39-40, other page numbers I can't be bothered finding right now), with his repeated threats to phone the police, along with his assessment of her as a "most unpleasant woman... he certainly was not going to allow her to get the better of him" - while George, the only one of the children who might reasonably conceptualised to have authority in her household, repeatedly allows he or Dick to interact with Mrs. Stick instead of her. Another example is the passage where George slaps Edgar and Edgar immediately threatens to fight her; Julian, a good condescending Englishman, steps in. "'You're not fighting George,' he said. 'She's a girl. If you want a fight, I'll take you on.'" While the reader may not like Julian's paternalistically protective attitudes, in these passages it is clear that he has the right of it: he can confront Mrs. Stick and stop the dogs from fighting, not George - despite the fact that, as a dogowner, George is surely much more likely to know as well as her father how to stop a pair of fighting dogs. [/English major]

The sad thing is that that probably will end up a paragraph in my research essay. :-/ I felt like a bit of an idiot getting Famous Five novels out of the library, I'll tell you what.

It has been many moons (like three days, whatevs) since last we spoke, livejournal, which I fear is because lately I'm knitting instead of reading my flist. Sorry! Lately I have knitted: slippers. I have also stared at a lot of sweater vest patterns and tried to decide which one I want to knit with this blue DK I just bought. Pattern recs appreciated.

Also, I just started term again and got WHACKED with a bunch of reading. I feel like I've been run over by a postcolonial bus. Ouch. (This is a bus that really wants me to know the difference between post-colonialism and post-coloniality, but is doing a really bad job of explaining - so - if you happen to know the difference, I pay in karma! Or baked goods if you live within 50km.)

( Classes this semester )

Also, grades are out: A+ (Supernatural, which I already knew on account of my fabulous essays), A+ (History of "Philosophy", AKA epistemology, which I HATED), A (Contemporary political philosophy, which I liked but found really really challenging - it was a 200-level paper, but IMO it was assessing at 300 level - certainly the amount of work done was 300-level equivalent). Thrilled with the latter two, totally don't deserve them (suspect good take-home essays dragged up the atrocious 0 hours of study exams I sat); happy with the former but in the good, I worked really hard, loved the paper, and totally deserve that mark way. Good results for a kind of crappy semester.

I just read an article on stuff.co.nz that the government plans to change course funding from the bums-on-seats method currently being used, where courses which attract higher numbers of students are more likely to continue to be funded. While this is theoretically great - because that approach involves chasing students, extremely competitive courses, and ultimately a huge loss of variety and broadness of course spectrum - I'm a little concerned about what they're changing it to.

Says the Stuff article, "[The Government] want[s] to change the emphasis from funding [courses] based on the number of students they attract to providing courses that are seen to be in the national interest." Adds Dr Cullen, "While academic freedom would be recognised, universities had acknowledged the public had a right to see taxpayers' money was used responsibly and strategically." That's okaaaaaay, although I am hesitant to say that Jo/e Public is the judge of what is a responsible use of funding - quite probably s/he would be perfectly happy with the continued loss of funding in the Arts degree, which suffers because people think it's useless (despite the fact that money from these popular courses is frequently used to fund expensive courses like Science and Engineering.) I don't like thinking that the value of so-called "useless" or "unpractical" courses like the poetry writing and reading course I'm taking is dependent for its continued existence on it being seen as valuable to the "national interest."

Sound alarmist? Maybe - surely the gvt can be trusted to keep its nose out of the Universities' choices? Except maybe not, because the article concludes: "The changes would be gradual not revolutionary and would steer universities into a greater partnership with business and their communities."

Um. Excuse me? Universities are supposed to be acting with the Business Roundtable now? But I don't wanna!

This move has been welcomed by the Otago University Students' Association and the NZ Vice-Chancellor's Committee (Headed by Roy Sharp, the busy little bee!) But that might have more to do with the $126 million in funding that comes with it, including some to help with the funding shift and some to help attract and retain staff to keep NZ universities competitive/respected internationally. I'd be interested to see what the New Zealand University Students' Association and the Association of University Staff have to say about it, but there's nothing yet. And maybe I am being paranoid and insane, but, yeesh, seriously, it does sound a little dodgy, right? It's not just me?

I am camping out in the maths department today to do my 251 assignment. It's worth a measley five percent of my final mark, and in the last two and a half hours I've spent SIGNIFICANTLY more time on just the first question than I did revising for a test I had in another class yesterday worth 20%. I fucking hate this lame piecemeal assessment.

I aim to be here until I finish and then hand it in whole hours early, it being not due 'til 9 am tomorrow. Probably it'll take me another six hours, tops, so I should even get to sleep tonight! I plan on keeping myself awake and, um, intense through the simple expedient of buying three boxes of muesli bars - not the healthy kind - a box of those fruit string things, three peaches, four nectarines and two large bags of M&Ms. Possibly overkill, but hey, I'll be haaappy. I also picked up a couple of bottles of TAB, which turns out to taste mostly like creaming soda, except fizzier. It also reminds me intermittently of L&P. This may be the first energy drink I can consume! But I haven't cracked it open yet and I'm going to leave it until I really, really need it, because I don't want to turn into my crazy mother who just about injects caffeine into her veins every morning.

Anyway, I took a short break about quarter of an hour ago and in the atrium I saw a flyer advertising tutoring for a COSC paper. The last sentence? "If you are having a lot of trouble with this course, it is good to get help now then fail the whole course at the end!"

And they say science students are smarter.

Hoooooome. *flops around* My absolute favourite thing about coming home to Christchurch is probably... the obscene amount of television I can watch before uni starts. So far this week I've bleached and scrubbed the bath and toilet, cleaned out the kitchen (including wiping every single cupboard both inside and out) and my bedroom, set up my room, and done several loads of washing.

I also had a really productive and exciting meeting of my choir's committee. We're a casual/fun choir associated with the university - except we're not associated as a choir but as a club. A few years ago we were apparently really big and pretty good, but some disasters with management, etc, in 2004 (the year before I arrived) basically sent most people packing, and since then we've struggled to keep more than twenty members. Last year our director of the previous year pissed off without finding a replacement, which basically sucked ass since none of the rest of us are music students (since the music students are all in the auditioned choir that I'm too scared to try out for.) So, Victoria directed and I helped out a bit and we got through to the end of the year okay, which was a relief but it was basically a long and sucky year, choir-wise. So we had a committee meeting - it's testament to the shape the choir was in that I got shoved onto the committee in my first year just because they were so desperate to get a quorum, but I actually really enjoy it. It looks like we're all excited about choir this year, we're planning an ambitious re-name and reimagining ourselves as a choir with, hopefully, a lot more personality.

We're thinking of calling ourselves Choirsoc, which IMO is a) way more fun-sounding than Bel Suono, b) more descriptive of what we actually do since, hey, we're a choir and we're social, c) way less off-putting than stupid italian. We're going to have singstar at Clubs Day - basically to get people coming over to us - and big signs and music and hopefully, fingers crossed, some scratch choir singing at lunch time. And our repertoire this year is going to be really different - we've previously sung a lot of traditional stuff which I love but - let's face it - it's boring and traditional. Hooooopefully this year we're going to sing some song by A Perfect Circle (yeah, doesn't do much for me, but whatevs, Vic's excited and it's different) and we're going to do some musical medleys - Rent, yay! and some more jazz and I'm going to see if I can find some swing and basically we're going to have a lot of fun this year. I really, really hope.

I've also watched the end of season two, all of season three, and the first two discs of season four of Gilmore Girls. (Um, I also, like, caught up with my mates and drank tequila til four in the morning and, you know, left the house. A lot! Honest!) Also, the last two episodes of SPN and the most recent BSG, ( commentary on which is under the cut )

Tonight I'm watching two weeks' worth of House and Bones. Hooray!

ETA: Oh, oh, the funniest "Houses of the Holy" recap.

Also, gang, I'm reading the flist only sporadically on account of it's a little bit sprawling right now. I'm going to cut some comms and things before uni start (and if you've been wanting to defriend, go ahead and do it, although I'll probably cry it'll be good for my grades ;)) but if I've missed something do link me?

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.

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.