An attempt to escape perfectionism

I can't get away from Wagner. If I end up working at all in twentieth-century literature, I am going to have to know more about Wagner than I do. I feel so unprepared right now for any kind of twentieth-century analysis; I am not familiar with most of the theories or the major critics and I don't really understand what the teacher wants when she says "Engage with the work." I clearly should be a medievalist. We get to work with manuscripts, and everything is so vague that it's a lot easier to fake your way through it. Plus I already am familiar with most of the historical contexts, at least in England. I need to be better with Scotland and Wales, and with English geography, though.

I still hate reading Joyce. There were a few moments in Ulysses that I could get through - Nausicaa was pretty interesting, and the operatic references were intriguing - but mostly I hated it. I have a better appreciation of Dubliners now, so that's good, and I understand what he was trying to do, and I understand why people find him interesting. He just doesn't work for me. I think Stephen Dedalus is a stupid and whiny character, I am not fascinated by the idea of excretion as creation, and I resent writing that is designed to be incomprehensible. I don't care if it's a parody of Latin histories - the sentences still need to make sense. I can deal with it if I have to diagram them out for them to make sense, even if I may not like it. I cannot deal with things that are designed to be incomprehensible. It is not good art. I got three pages into "Oxen of the Sun" before I broke down and almost started crying. It's an interesting concept; I just can't deal with it. Take your moocows and keep them away from me.

One of my flatmates seems to have problems with the concept that people are different than she is. She doesn't seem to understand why someone would choose getting sleep (and not being hungover) over going out and drinking until you can't stand up. She also doesn't seem to understand why someone would own more books than they need for class, or why someone would want to study something that required them to read on a very regular basis. She also doesn't seem to understand the emotional and energy difference between being 20 and being 27. To be fair, most of my other flatmates don't really understand that difference, either, but at least they accept it. We don't get along terribly well.

I have joined the Postgraduate theatre group here. We are going to attempt to put on "Six Characters in Search of an Author", a very interesting play about the nature of reality and theatre, etc. There were 25 people at the first meeting, ten at the second, and six at auditions. I'm wondering how well this is going to work.

I recently went on a DVD-buying binge, sparked by massive sales at Amazon and a store in town that's going out of business. I need to remember that just because I got more money out of my loan this term doesn't mean that I need to spend all the money. It is nice for my materialistic, acquisitive nature to have a lot of my favourite movies on hand, though.