Yet more whining

I don’t understand what I am doing wrong. I don’t understand what is wrong with me that I can’t actually get jobs that I interview for. I am an intelligent person who presents herself well – or at least I try to – but for some reason they don’t want me. This is the second job this fall that I have interviewed for that has seemed perfect for me, and I haven’t gotten it. I don’t understand what I’m doing wrong!

Am I applying for the wrong jobs? Am I saying something wrong in the interview? Is it the American accent? What do I need to do differently?

I need a job. For financial reasons, I just need a job. For mental health reasons, I want a job that I can care about, but that doesn’t drain me to the point of tears every day (teaching). I want a job that I can throw myself into, that I can talk about passionately at parties. But at the very least, I want a job that doesn’t drain me to the point of tears every day. Apparently that is too much to ask for.

Annoyance and Entertainment

The most annoying thing about having my leg in a cast? (Other than, you know, the fact that my leg is in a cast?) Is wearing only one shoe. My poor left shoes are scattered and lonely around the house, forlorn and abandoned for at least another week and a half.

The other annoying thing? My walking boot for the cast is higher than any of my flats, but not high enough to justify any of my heels, even if I would wear only one heeled shoe (which I wouldn’t). I can deal with the bright blue clashing with all my clothes, because hey, I’m in a cast. But I have a harder time with the asymmetry of it. One shoe. One side that is lower than the other, even if it’s not by that much. It’s incredibly annoying.

I can deal with the questions. “Oh, no, what’d you do?” (stress fractures. Two of them. In my foot. I don’t know how, exactly, other than “walking”.) “How’s your leg?” (My foot, actually, and fine, other than frustrating because I’m in a cast.) “Are you okay doing that?” (Yes. I have a broken foot. I’m not a quadriplegic. Nothing against quadriplegics. And after more than a week – nearly two, now – in a cast, I’ve kind of gotten the hang of most things.)

If I do have to be in a cast, even for only a few weeks, I’m going to have fun with it, though. Because life should be all about keeping me entertained. My life should, at least. So I bought the multi-pack of coloured Sharpies and have been decorating my cast. This is good for a variety of reasons, not least because it distracts me from how yellow the thing is getting. I make – I mean, let – other people draw on it, too. My boyfriend drew an amazing desert island/rainbow scene that used every single one of the colours. I was very impressed. I think I’m going to start carrying the Sharpies around with me so that other people can draw on it too. It really should be more than just me and my boyfriend.

I’m really hoping that it comes off when it’s time to go back to the doctor, though. I have plans that do not involve being forced to limp and keeping my ankle immobile. Entertaining as I try to make it, I’m still in a cast. And it’s still annoying.

Race for Life

There are a lot of differences between the UK’s cancer research fundraiser Race for Life, and the US cancer research fundraiser Relay for Life. Relay for Life is based on time, and you’re generally sponsored a certain amount for a time or a distance walked. Race for Life is a 5K (although some places have 10K events as well), and most of my sponsorship came straight in, not contingent on anything else. Relay for Life is also open to anyone – my family usually does it as a team event, and trade off shifts to walk. Race for Life is a women-only fundraiser, which I find both awesome and disturbingly sexist.

I participated in Race for Life in Nottingham this last weekend. My fundraising page is still up for a few weeks, if you want to donate. (www.raceforlifesponsorme.org/rachelandkendra) My friend Rachel pulled in a couple of her other friends, and together we were Team Pink.

Race for Life is a very pink thing. Pink has become the traditional colour for breast cancer support, and because it’s women-only, there was an awful lot of pink around. We helped contribute to the pink atmosphere by wearing pink wigs, pink headbands with either pink mouse ears or pink devil horns on them, pink shirts, pink leg warmers, pink face paint, pink grease paint on our arms, and pink spray-on glitter (which you couldn’t really see, but we knew it was there). It was so very pink, and we weren’t even the most pink team on the track.

I’d had big plans, when Rachel and I signed up in January, to actually get into the habit of running and be able to run the 5K without stopping. That didn’t happen. I started training pretty well – more consistently when it started getting warmer – but my ankles started hurting, and I lost my ankle supports, so I stopped until I could get more. Then, the week before the race, I did something to my foot – possibly exacerbated by the too-small shoes I accidentally wore one day – that made it very painful to walk. It’s something that’s happened before, and I still don’t know what it is other than “painful”. So when the race came around, I didn’t run more than about five minutes at a stretch (although, for whatever reason, running was actually easier on my foot than walking. But still – ouch). My goal is to be able to run 5K by next year’s race, whether I participate or not. This does, of course, depend on my feet not being stupid and injury-prone, however.

Our team name got a slight alteration when the day of the race came. It started raining Saturday night, with proper thunder and lightning and everything else that makes me slightly homesick for the Midwest. Sunday morning, it poured (and there were a few cracks of lightning). It rained, and rained, and rained. The sheets of water that came up from the bus I was on to get to the race went almost as high as the bus itself. The sweatshirt I was wearing was drenched by the time I got to the place where we were getting ready. My socks stayed wet until I got home several hours later and peeled them off. Given all the rain, we renamed ourselves Team Pink Drowned Rats.

But the rain stopped about an hour before the race started, and by the time we were actually going, it was bright, warm, and incredibly humid. I think by the end our faces were just as pink as our wigs.

It was interesting that we were one of the tamer groups racing. There were quite a lot of wigs – pink or otherwise. There were babies in pushchairs, puppies wearing pink boas and Race for Life signs, printed T-shirts with pictures and race numbers on them. But the best were the costumes. Three rabbits with “Durawell” batteries, and, the best thing, SpongeBob and Patrick. I was warm enough in jogging trousers and a T-shirt; I can’t even imagine how hot it got inside a giant SpongeBob.

About 5000 people participated, they said. Plenty of people ran, even more walked. There was an aerobic warmup at the beginning, including a performance by the Nivea Boys (Nivea is a sponsor of Race for Life) where they sang and danced to one of the cheesiest songs that was out when I lived in England as an undergrad. (DON’T STOP MOVING!!!! WOOOO S CLUB 7!!!!) I laughed hysterically for about thirty seconds, and then started dancing along. Because you have to, when you hear a song that brings up those kinds of memories.

At the end, everyone got a medal and a carrier bag with stuff – a breakfast bar, a bottle of water, some Nivea products, and entries to various contests. I haven’t really looked through it in depth yet. After the race, I went home with my wonderful housemates who’d come to support me, and we all just collapsed on the couch and watched movies for the rest of the day. But the reason that they were also exhausted is another story…..

I’m glad I participated in Race for Life. I wish things had gone differently: I wish I hadn’t hurt my foot, I wish I could have run the whole 5K, I wish I had been more active (and potentially annoying) about raising money. But every little bit counts, and I’m glad to be the European branch of my family’s cancer research fundraising.

Hoarding Minutiae

I am a packrat. A hoarder. A collector. Whatever you want to call it. I make excuses like “it’s genetic” (my grandparents all kept everything “in case it was useful someday”, almost to the point of pathology), “but what if I will want it eventually” and “nostalgia” and in the meantime, books and papers and …..well, mostly books pile up around me.

And right now my mom and my uncles are sorting through my grandfather’s house, and his lifetime of hoarding and saving everything that came through the door. It’s a daunting task, and a stressful one, and a sad one. How do you balance the longing to acknowledge the past with the desire to lead a simple(ish) life yourself, and the space limitations of modern middle-class living?

It’s made even more difficult, emotionally, by the fact that my family has not just a lengthy history, but a strong sense of history. We are all well aware that sometimes the most innocuous-looking things can turn out to be important. I just read a biography of a Tudor woman where most of the information for her life comes from household accounts. But, really, once the account books aren’t of any use for tax purposes or something similar, who wants to keep them around? But they are historically one of the best sources we have for daily life one or two or five hundred years ago.

We want to keep the important things, but how do we know what the important things are? What’s important now may not be important in one or two or five hundred years. And while there is an argument to be made about the cultural knowledge that comes from shifting priorities, I also can’t help but wish that more minutiae survived.

This is one reason that I’m so excited that the Library of Congress has the entire public Twitter archive now. Past Tweets may not be of huge significance (although some are, either culturally or personally), but the collection of cultural minutiae has the potential to be fascinating not only for current sociologists, linguists, and anthropologists, but for future historians as well. I just wish it were so easy to save and store the physical collections of minutiae as well.

(Apparently I really like the word "minutiae"...)

Ponderings

I just started reading Bess of Hardwick by Mary S. Lovell. It’s been on my TBR list for literally years, and last year I picked up a copy at Oxfam, and now I’m finally getting to it.

One problem I have, as a confirmed book addict, is that everything I read makes me want to read more. Reading Blink, which I finished this afternoon, made me want to read The Tipping Point and other sociological/psychological things. But Bess is insidious. Even after just reading the introduction, I want to read a ton of stuff.

None of it’s really related to the Tudors, though – they’re a little bit out of my period. No, what the introduction to Bess did is make me want to get back to my own research: music in Middle English literature. I have over 200 articles and many, many poems saved on their own hard drive, just waiting for my attention. And they’re always at the back of my mind, but what the introduction to Bess has done is bring them to the front.

Blink aided and abetted this as well, with all its talk of experts being able to hone their snap judgment ability. I found myself wanting to be an expert in something – and what am I an expert in? Middle English poetry and its connection to music. I also had lunch today with a PhD-student friend of mine, and that helped the motivation as well.

I have been telling myself that I will keep collecting and reading articles and poems (thank goodness for TEAMS) so that when I am financially able to do a PhD, I won’t be completely out of the loop. Maybe it’s time that I make a dedicated study plan and actually do it.

Epic films, part one

Over Easter, I had a lot of time on my hands and, like I said in a previous entry, I was in the mood for long-form entertainment. So I fulfilled some Easter traditions, and gave in to some cravings, and watched some epic films.

Gone with the Wind:

This had been on my mind for ages, probably close to a year off and on. And when mental_floss reminded me of the Carol Burnett “Went with the Wind,” and posted some of the screen tests for Gone with the Wind, I decided to watch the whole thing.

I had forgotten how incredibly good that movie is. Yeah, it’s incredibly long, but it doesn’t drag. The story keeps moving, from pretty nearly the first scene all the way through to the end. So much happens, but it’s not overwhelming with anything either. It’s incredibly well-paced.

And it’s incredibly well-acted, too. Hattie McDaniels, of course, won Best Supporting Actress (her acceptance speech was another clip on mental_floss, and it made me tear up). But Vivian Leigh and Clark Gable are nearly perfect. Rhett is not a horrible person: he’s mercenary and he admits it. But Scarlett …. is. She’s mercenary, and knows it, but does her absolute best to make it appear otherwise. She’s a horrible person, but you can’t help but sympathize with her. You love her and, even while you want her to get her comeuppance somehow, you still want her to succeed.

I had expected to find the movie more dated. It is so often seen as a love song and an elegy to the Old South. There are definitely elements of racism. And it certainly wouldn’t be made today. But I felt, while watching it this time, that the “oh, woe are we” part of it was found more in the screen narration (someone pleeeeease tell me the actual term for this? The written narration that comes up on the screen, like the dialogue in silent movies) rather than in the story or the acting. Scarlett was a belle of the Old South, no question, and she milked that for all that it was worth. And there are certainly characters who moan the loss of the Old South way of life. But both Scarlett and Melanie do their absolute best, everything they can, to move on from that way of life and to adapt to the new order and the new lifestyle that they must. Scarlett does it by becoming a businesswoman and a fantastic manager of Tara. Melanie does it through emotional support, and by refusing to give in to fear and despair the way that Scarlett’s family does. Two very different women, but both adapting in their own way.

I also found myself much more frustrated with Ashley than I remember being before. He explicitly tells Scarlett that if it weren’t for Melanie, he’d marry her, that he loves her. Is it really any wonder that she can’t fully move on from that? If Ashley had been harsh at the beginning, and been honest with Scarlett about his true feelings, it could have been a much different story.

I love the ending, too. It’s complete, but also full of hope for things to come. I like to think that Scarlett finds a way to get Rhett back, and makes Tara a successful plantation again. I can’t quite imagine the exact way that she does it, but I fully believe that she will.

The Ten Commandments:

This is an Easter tradition in the US, and it’s been a few years since I’ve seen it. This, unlike Gone with the Wind, was dated. The acting was good, but the presentation was incredibly dated. There was even a speech at the beginning about … I don’t remember, something about standing up to government and following rules and whatever else. I didn’t really pay attention.

The acting was so incredibly stylized. It’s not bad, of course, but it’s very stylized. There were a few points where I couldn’t help laughing, because by modern standards, it’s so ridiculous. The plagues were skimmed over – not even montaged! River to blood, immediately followed by death of the first-born.

I also, as a feminist, was a bit disturbed by the implication that “God hardening pharaoh’s heart” was done by a jealous woman. A beautiful, well-acted jealous woman, but still a jealous woman. It struck me as sexist in a way that it hasn’t before. (of course, it’s been at least ten years since I’d watched the whole thing. Probably more like fifteen.)

But Charlton Heston is fantastic. So once I’d watched The Ten Commandments, I had to watch something else of his.

Ben Hur:

What can I say about Ben-Hur? It, like Gone with the Wind, is a nearly perfect film. It’s got good pacing, good acting, everything. There’s a reason that it won a record number of Oscars. It actually wouldn’t be unthinkable that this could be made today.

*sigh*

As you can tell, I’m kind of running out of steam. I’ll have to write about my absolute love for Peter O’Toole (Lawrence of Arabia, The Lion in Winter, sparked by Casanova) some other time. (And maybe by then I’ll have watched Becket.) (And, also, hopefully it won’t take me a month to get to it.)

Election thoughts

It’s Election Day in the UK. It’s a tense election here, and people are really looking forward to the end of the campaigning. To which I say, “You have no idea of how easy you have it.”

I kind of like the UK system of elections. I don’t mean the bizarre constituencies or the first-past-the-post thing (although I think it makes some sense with a more than two-party election) or the whole “voting for a party and not a candidate” idea. No, I like that you don’t officially know when an election is until a month or so before the election. I like that elections must be no more than five years apart, but can be less if needed. I like that the UK politicians aren’t in a nearly-constant state of outright campaigning. I understand the benefits of knowing that there will be an election for this post on this day in this year (aka the US system), but I have to say that I really like that the UK, in general, lets politicians do their jobs without the pressure of spending half their time trying to keep their job. I like that there aren’t political posters plastering the streets for more than a month.

It will be interesting to see what happens in this election. It’s always slightly more interesting when you don’t have a huge emotional investment in the outcome; you can see a little bit more clearly. Because I hold fairly liberal political views on most things, I would like to see Labour and the Liberals do well. But when it comes right down to it, I don’t have a real investment in this election, because I can’t vote here.

I saw a headline yesterday – and, to be fair, I didn’t read the article – that said that Gordon Brown claimed the debates had clouded the campaign. There’s a lesson in that for everyone, I think: Just because something doesn’t go your way doesn’t mean that it is essentially bad. The actual voters I know who watched the debates appreciated them. Just because Gordon Brown didn’t do well at them doesn’t mean that they have been bad for the process. If you can’t hold up your manifesto and maintain your position at a debate (for which you have had quite a lot of preparation time, theoretically), how do you expect to be able to run a country? It’s an attitude that I think is more prevalent in the US. Frequently, if an election doesn’t go a party’s way, they expend a lot of money, time, and energy on trying to discredit that election. Both sides do this. It’s a very bipartisan thing, this sense of entitlement. But, as in a quotation from The West Wing: In a democracy, sometimes the other guy wins. Also: You lost, deal with it.

(And maybe try a little harder next time.)

Restarting, take 29348

I am lying on my bed, in my pajamas, watching the darkening grey sky that is either a result of the Icelandic volcano or just normal England spring, and it’s 8:30 pm. Why am I in my pajamas at 8:30 pm, you might ask? Well, because this week I started an internship. It’s supposed to be only four days a week, but since this is my first week, I’ve gone in every day – to make myself known, to let myself get to know the project and the people.

It’s a four month internship, so I’ll be there until the end of July. Four months of sitting in an open-plan office, making databases and sending email. I honestly could not be more thrilled. I said, after last fall, that I needed a quiet office job, and that is what I have right now.

Plus, the database I’m currently making is of research case studies from every school in the university. I get to read representative research from every field. How could I not love this? I said in an email to my supervisor today that I keep getting distracted from building the database by actually reading the case studies. I keep finding out about research centres that are based here that I had no idea even existed. Like the Centre for Evidence-Based Dermatology, which is actually in the same building as I am.

It’s amazing how hope and energy come back when you have something external to do. I’ve picked up some writing from a “content mill” (where you get paid by pageviews, for the most part), plus this internship, and I’m starting to feel like a productive member of society again. And even though I’ve been fairly tired when I’ve gotten home this week, it’s been the kind of tired that makes me yawn, not the kind of tired that makes me unable to do anything but stare mindlessly at the computer. (Instead, I stare mindfully at the computer. Or something.)

The tiredness also may have something to do with the commute – I’ve walked both ways every day. There is a bus combination that could do it, but honestly with the waiting and the changing it would probably take about as long. And it’s been mostly nice outside. Like I said at the top, the greyness of today is either due to typical English spring or the Iceland volcano that’s pushing an ash plume across the British Isles and northern Europe today. Tuesday afternoon was drizzly, and I probably should have taken the bus, but every other day has been fine or sunny. It takes me just under an hour to get to the campus where I’m working. Home again takes a little bit longer if I stop at the store for some food (even though I really should be eating what I have in the house, by the time I am coming home I am so hungry that I can’t focus on “what do I want to make tonight”). As the weeks go on, I’m sure that I’ll get used to the hours and the walk and the lack of snacking (or manage to snack more) and I’ll be fine. I’m developing some calluses on my feet already from the shoes I’ve been wearing.

I really am excited about the project I’m interning on. It’s sort of a University-wide practice for the research assessment that’s coming up in a couple of years – the guidelines and requirements have changed, and no one really knows what to expect, so it’s probably best that we figure it out before the real thing comes. It manages to satisfy my mild organizational obsession with the database creation and the file-naming, it lets me be in thrall to academia and research (even if it’s not my research) for a little while longer, it lets me work with adults who know what they’re doing, and work on things that I kind of know how to do, and am getting better at every day (even little things like “go to Marie and ask her to do this thing” – that’s something I’m getting better at!)

I’m already not looking forward to (late) August, after this job is over and after my mom goes home. I know that this summer is going to be fantastic, and I won’t want it to end.

Media Roundup, Part 1

I have been in a "long-form" video mood lately. Actually, I've been in a long-form everything mood: instead of single tracks, I've been listening to whole albums (Ocean Eyes, by Owl City, mostly, although I also finished the Ring last night) and instead of random TV episodes, I've been watching movies or whole series. (There is one tiny exception to this, which is Doctor Who, which is possibly self-explanatory.)

It started with Casualty 1900s, which I wrote about before and have watched all of about five more times since my birthday. But even I can't watch a series incessantly. I needed a break, something new and stimulating. But I was still in a "historical" mood, so bring on Foyle's War, which my best friend had been recommending for ages.

Foyle's War, if you don't know, is a British TV series set in WW2 Hastings. Each episode is about an hour and a half long (so two hours when it aired on ITV, a commercial network). Detective Chief Superintendent Foyle is a WW1 veteran who (eventually) sees his role in the war effort to be keeping down crime on the homefront - murder doesn't stop being murder just because there's a war on.

Each episode is a discrete story; the story arcs come from the war itself and the main characters. Foyle's sergeant lost a leg in the Norway campaign; Foyle's son is in the RAF; they're in Hastings, on the coastline, so fear of invasion is a running theme for a while. Each episode is incredibly grounded in the real events: Dunkirk, the American presence, the Blitz, the Normandy invasion, etc. It's so well-researched; in addition to being a compelling procedural, it gives such a vivid picture of life on the coast and the homefront during the war. I learned about things that I'd never known existed (like Exercise Tiger) and got a sense for things that I couldn't possibly experience. And I can't say enough good things about the actors. I fell in love with them all. (However, as a warning: the murder in the first episode is the most vivid and quite horrific.)

Next on the list was Life on Mars, which keeps on with the historical police drama theme. It's so different from Foyle's War, though: in Life on Mars, the main character is in a car accident in 2006 and wakes up in 1973. Is he mad? in a coma-induced hallucination? or actually a time-traveller? It's never made 100% clear, although the last episode leans greatly toward the coma-induced hallucination with a touch of near-death time-travelling.

This is another series where the actors and the characters totally make the series. The stories themselves aren't anything too special and unique; it's the characters, especially John Simm as Sam Tyler, that make them shine. The final episode in particular was stunning. I had tears in my eyes at the end. It was heartbreakingly sad and inevitably right at the same time.

Next on the list was the BBC miniseries of Casanova. David Tennant and Peter O'Toole. *sigh* It was incredibly funny. I don't know why I didn't expect it to be funny, given that it was written by Russell T. Davies... There were some absolute laugh-out-loud moments. David Tennant overcomes many different levels of bad hair and just leaps off the screen. I may be biased here, but he was just fantastic. And Peter O'Toole as the aged Casanova exuded faded sexuality - he's always been wonderful and I'm so glad he's still acting. I completely believed the love between Casanova and Henriette (even though it's probably not historically accurate....and why isn't Laura Fraser better known?) and now I want to read Casanova's memoirs. Just skimming the Wikipedia article made me realize that his romantic reputation is only a small part of who he was. (Well, not small. That enduring legend couldn't be founded on anything .... small.)

The last series I want to mention is Lost in Austen. It was quite cute, and I enjoyed some of the liberties they took with Pride and Prejudice (especially Wickham. I unashamedly loved Wickham in this version. They made him believably redeemable). It did fall into the Darcy trap but not for long, and it was quite amusing to watch Amanda panic and try to "fix" everything. Causes and consequences were kind of hand-waved away, but it's a charming enough series.

Next time: films.

Run, run, as fast as you can

Race for Life Training: Day 1

Time to race: 2 months, 11 days

I started training today for the Race for Life that I’m running in just under two and a half months now. I remembered two things:

1. I do actually like running.

2. I suck at running.

(Race for Life is basically Relay for Life, but it’s a set distance. The one I’m doing is a 5K. I’m running with a friend of mine. I’ll put up a link to the fundraising page once we’ve tweaked it just a little bit.)

Getting in better shape has been a goal of mine for years, but I am lazy. I end up with this weird mental block about when I can do things and then inertia takes over and I just sit on my bed and watch videos and check Google Reader and check facebook and check my email and check Google Reader and check facebook….. Race for Life is my motivation. I know that in two and a half months, I have promised to run a 5K. Therefore, I have no choice.

It was great today. A really comfortable temperature for being outside – better than our house, at least. And it seems like I went at the perfect time, since now it’s getting dark and cloudy. I went twice around the lake at the park, jogging about a third of it. I probably could have done more, but I didn’t want to feel like collapsing on the way home. I met lots of cute dogs, too. I miss having a pet (I am a cat person but have no problems with dogs) so I always enjoy seeing the ones on walks, and feel kind of bad when their owner tries to pull them away.

And, even though I suck at running – like I said, I only jogged about a third of my distance today – I do enjoy it. I enjoy the endorphins. I enjoy the sense of accomplishment. I have just been brainwashed by a lot of different people to believe that I’m not athletic, that I am incompetent at physical activity. I had a great PE teacher in elementary school. Fourth grade on was a totally different story. This is an opportunity for me to rewrite that programming. I’m not the best athlete. I still can’t throw or catch and have a fear of spherical objects flying at my head. But I can run. I will run.

Cravings

I am a firm believer in the idea that you should give in to your cravings. Within reason, of course. I'm not a hedonist. But cravings are one way that your body tells you what you need. If you're craving fish and chips, it's probably because you need whatever nutrients and starches are in fish and chips, and you are perfectly justified in paying the 1.99 for a Sainsbury's ready meal even though you've told yourself that you won't buy any more food until you eat what you have in the house.

Reading cravings work the same way. They tell you what your mind and soul needs. And if you try to force a book on your mind that doesn't fit those needs, it can go very badly.

For example, I have 25+ books on my shelves that I haven't read and want to. I started reading one a few days ago. it's by a writer whom I like (at least, I liked his first book). But I can't get into it. It doesn't hold my attention. It doesn't fit my cravings. There's nothing wrong with the writing. It's just not what I'm looking for right now.

And then I went to the newly refurbished local library (which has beautiful new self-service machines) and came out with three books that I will probably finish in the next couple of days: one that I read about on a blog just recently, and two by an author that I've had a craving to reread for ages. I'm already further in one of the books I checked out four hours ago than I am in the book that I've been reading for four days. I also had a craving to sit in a coffee shop - or at least an aversion to sitting at home - so I did that too, and wrote a letter, a poem, and a journal entry as well as reading several chapters.

Give in to the cravings. Your spirit will thank you.

Look! I have friends! And other miscellany

Three days in a row, including tomorrow, I will spend at least a few hours a day with friends. As in, leave my house and deliberately go somewhere to spend time with people I don’t live with. I’m always a little bit amazed when this happens. I forget, sometimes, that I have friends who want to and can spend time with me.

Yesterday I had lunch with a flatmate from last year, who just got a PhD place here. So yay! She’s coming back to town! It’s very exciting! Especially since she’s the one flatmate from last year that I’ve kept in consistent touch with. And it’s inspired me to at least think about getting back to my own research stuff. I started reading Pearl last night. It’s slow going, but Middle English always is.

Today I was sitting on my bed, slowly getting ready for the day (not unusual), in my bathrobe and towel-turban, when there was a knock on my door and a friend called “BREAKFAST!” So I got dressed and he treated me to breakfast. Then he accompanied me to my initial counseling session, and after that was over, we went to Nottingham Contemporary for the Star City (art and propaganda surrounding the Soviet space program) exhibit.

And while we were doing that, I got a text from another friend, inviting me for coffee before she leaves next week. But I was, of course, unavailable, so I suggested tomorrow instead (we’re meeting for lunch). I’m going to miss her sooooo much when she goes.

I really like Nottingham Contemporary as a gallery. As a building, it’s growing on me although I still think it looks out of place. But as a gallery, it’s lovely. The current exhibit (their second), as I said, focuses on the Soviet space program. It’s named Star City, after the cosmonaut quarters outside of Moscow. It’s primarily modern art, although there are some prints of propaganda posters. It’s also a multimedia exhibit, with a few video and audio things complementing the visual art. The first two galleries also had a sort of electrical theme to them. There was really only one piece that stood out to both me and my friend as “good”* - a sort-of abstract representation of a womb with a red fetus and a black fetus (twins). The red one had a small picture of Castro and the black one had a small picture of Kennedy. I can’t remember the full title, but “We are twins” was a part of it. There was also a giant spacesuit – able to be walked through – representing Tereshkova. One of the things that the Soviet space program did so much better than the US space program was diversity, especially inclusion of women.

*We both agreed that we don’t really “get” modern art in many cases. I was reminded of that Murphy Brown episode, as I almost always am while at contemporary art galleries.

For my birthday, my awesome housemates got me the DVD set of Casualty 1900s, which I had been wanting for a while. And I am obsessed, and can’t stop watching it. There are only 10 episodes at this point, and no word yet on whether there will be another series (season), but I love every single one. It’s so well-produced, well-written, well-acted, and above all, historically accurate. Historical fiction of the highest quality, with a touch of the soaps thrown in. It’s made me ever so interested in medical history, as well as the personal histories of the characters. (Like the lead romantic couple, Dr Culpin and Nurse Bennett, who did get married in real life, eventually.) It’s also helped me clarify my “modern” history/literature interest, which is absolutely Edwardian. Give me 1901-1919 and I’m happy. Much past that, and you get into officially modernist territory, which I really don’t like as much. Even my true literary love, Forster, is more appealing to me in the early works (Room with a View was 1906, Howards End 1910). I knew this before, of course, but this has helped me actually formulate it.

Entering my 30th year

364 days to get my “before I’m 30” list done. And instead of doing anything productive on the list, I’m lying on the couch, ill, and watching DVDs. It’s really not that different from what I do during the day, except that I’m slightly feverish and coughing, and therefore allowing myself not to feel guilty about not working on my books and stories. I’m also allowing myself to stay inside all day – normally I force myself outside at least once a day. I did answer the door earlier, so that counts as my fresh air for the day. It’s really too bad, because it was beautiful and warm today. But I am staying in bed until I am well, or at least better.

Overall, it was a pretty good birthday. Apart from the being ill thing, of course. I got lots of birthday wishes on facebook. Some were expected, some were unexpected. All were welcome. I had nice long conversations with some people and watched The Princess Bride with my housemates, who’d never seen it.

The best part about my birthday was that I hadn’t really missed out on any celebrations. My housemates and I all have birthdays within about six weeks of each other, and this year our combined ages add up to 100. So last weekend we had a joint birthday party for the four of us. The theme was 100 Years Under the Sea, because of our birthdays and the Dolphin Paradise. Of course, being a party that my housemate planned, it was a costume/fancy dress party. I just wore a pretty dress and called myself a water nymph. Among the others were a mermaid (housemate), the Titanic (housemate), a scuba diver (friend, won prize for best costume), a mob informer (friend), a sailor (friend), and a disguised merman (friend, won prize for best excuse). It was a great party. Some people got very drunk (not me, I don’t drink to excess anymore if I can avoid it), and I stayed up until half past five talking to one of my housemates. (This is one of the reasons that I am sick.)

Looking back on the last year, it’s been very eventful. I got an MA, I had a fairly active social life, I moved house (from the dorms to an actual house), I had a minor breakdown and actually sought help for it (and got help for it, also unusual), I went back to the States for whirlwind events (my sister’s M.Ed. and my grandfather’s funeral), I won a short story contest, and I continued my almost decade-long quarter-life crisis. I still don’t know what I want to be “when I grow up”, at least not what I want to do to make a living. I still want to write, I still do write, but I need something to keep paying the bills, and teaching is on hold until I get myself mentally stable again.

And I have 364 days to finish my list.

Feminism and the Olympics

I don’t necessarily consider myself a rabid feminist, most of the time. I am a feminist, of course – I think that women and men should have the same opportunities and that gender should not be a barrier to anything except childbirth. But I am not particularly hard-core about it. I’ll point out sexism when I see it but I don’t make speeches, I don’t preach. I’m not a feminist that thinks that the only way to get a sort of balance is to spend the next few generations promoting women at the expense of men. I don’t even think that most of the things that other people point out as sexism is necessarily sexism.

And then I watched the Olympics, and the rabid feminism side of me came out. It started, a little bit, at the beginning of the Games, when I became aware that female ski jumpers had applied for admission to the Games, and the IOC had denied them because, apparently, women don’t jump far enough to make it interesting. And I thought, hmm. That’s kind of odd and unfair. But I didn’t really think anything more about it, except when articles would mention it, because the Games had started so there really wasn’t anything to be done about it for this year anyway.

And then my switch was tripped by something that a commentator said after the women’s gold medal hockey match. As they were handing out the medals, this commentator was naming each player and praising them. For one of the Canadian players who’d scored a goal, she said, “That was worthy of a men’s hockey game.” And that’s when I started to see red.

It’s one of those comments that sounds like a compliment, and was probably intended to be a compliment, but it basically says that women’s hockey is not as good as men’s hockey; that women aren’t athletes of the same caliber as men; that women are only valued in sport as they relate to men. It’s a figurative pat on the head for women’s hockey: oh, isn’t that cute, how the girls think they can play the same games as the boys.

And I’m sure that it wasn’t meant in a negative way, but that almost makes it worse. This is what people mean when they talk about societal sexism. The women of the Canadian and US hockey teams deserve credit in their own right for participating, for playing well, and for winning the medals that they did. They should not be compared to the men; it should certainly not be even implied that they are less capable than the men.

Quite a lot of the men’s hockey players, on a number of national teams, are professional hockey players. The women aren’t. The women are mostly college players, early twenties. The women are amateur athletes (and that gets into my issues with professional athletes in the Olympics in general, which is another rant). The women have just as much right, if not more, to be at the Olympics and to be credited wholly with their success, not to have it degraded in any way.

Hawthorn and Cauliflower

The unluckiest day to get married is a Saturday in May, at least according to English superstition. My best friend and I discovered this last night as we were browsing Oxfam’s online shop¹ for wedding dresses.

It’s such a stereotypically girl thing to do – and neither of us is dating anyone² so it’s really more of an academic exercise than anything else. But some of these dresses were actually really amazing. Some of them were the trendy strapless kind, of course, which are lovely but not for me³, but I think I found my hypothetical wedding dress.⁴ Some of the dresses are not so amazing. There was one in particular that was just horrifyingly bad. It overemphasized the hips and butt area, and didn’t look like it would fit an actual woman. My eyes, they burned. But some of the dresses were great, and in the fictional world where I get married and have a wedding⁵, I am at least looking at Oxfam first.⁶

Not all the dresses were white, either. There was a silver one and a gold one and one with a tartan train. It got us thinking about the traditions and superstitions around weddings. Most people know “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue” but did you know that Saturday used to be considered unlucky for weddings? Wednesday was the best day to get married. And May used to be an unlucky month. July and August weren’t bad, but November and December would bring you the most happiness. There are also superstitions about the dress colour and what day you buy the ring. And of course there are the traditions within the ceremony itself: the bridesmaids’ role as decoys, leaving the bridal outfit unfinished until the morning of the wedding, the cake, the confetti, shoes on the back of the car.

But my favourite by far is the medieval Breton tradition around the proposal. This just fascinates me. A suitor would leave a hawthorn branch outside his beloved’s door on May Day. If she accepted, she would leave it there. If she rejected him, she would replace it with a cauliflower. This brings all sorts of questions to my mind. What if the girl was away for the day? What if there was more than one marriageable daughter in the house? What if a girl had more than one suitor? What if someone interfered and stole the hawthorn branch, or the cauliflower? What does a boy do if he wants to propose on a different date? On the surface it seems like such a simple procedure, but I am afraid that it would be more trouble than it’s worth. But as long as they don’t get married on a May Saturday, I’m sure everything would work out.

¹Did you know that Oxfam sells wedding dresses through its online shop? Did you know that Oxfam has an online shop? They do. I volunteer there.

²She only seems to attract creepy guys, and I only seem to help guys figure out that they want someone else.

³I’d be too worried about it falling down, no matter how tightly it was taped and bound.

⁴My views on marriage and weddings are firm, although not immutable, and very similar to my views on children: great and wonderful and special….when they’re other people’s.

⁵That order is deliberate.

⁶I think I'm done with the footnotes now.

I tried to do the jumping-footnotes thing, but it didn't work....I'll learn html better and then come back and fix them. Sorry for making you all scroll up and down.

Quick sports thoughts

This is totally unorganized and possibly incoherent, since it's 3:30 am. I may write more later. I may not. But for now.....

That was one of the best, most competitive Super Bowls that I’ve ever seen. I am so, so, so, so glad that the Saints won. I said on Twitter in the first quarter: “You know how I said I would be okay if the Colts won? Apparently I lied.”

The final score does not reflect the game. It does reflect the fourth quarter. That was an amazing interception. When the two-minute warning started, I thought for a little while that Peyton Manning would be able to pull it off, especially after the Saints penalty. All it would have taken would have been a quick touchdown, an onside kick recovered by the Colts, and one long Manning completion, and it would have been different. But the Saints defense stepped up and stopped them.

I also said to various people that it’s too bad that the coach can’t be the MVP. Drew Brees deserves it, no question, but the unusual play-calling was such a factor in the win: the onside kick to start the second half (seriously, who does that?) and the challenge on the 2-point conversion (which I’m very glad did not end up being the game-winning play, because it would have sparked off the whole challenge/replay debate AGAIN) are the two most obvious examples, but through the whole thing it was a very tight and well-called game.

I love The Who, so I liked the halftime show. It felt a bit incomplete, though – although maybe that was just because I knew it was only half the Who. Townshend is still awesome, and seemed to windmill every time he could. Daltrey may not be quite as perfect as he was a few decades ago, but can still bring it. Now I want to play Rock Band…..

Obviously I didn’t see any of the commercials. Apparently I didn’t miss much. Interesting (and kind of sad) that one of the best-played Super Bowl games was one of the worst in terms of the advertising.

Bring on the Olympics! Once again I am in the UK when the Winter Olympics are in North America. I anticipate a looooot of curling airtime, and a lot of late nights trying to catch figure skating and skiing.

Desert Island Discs

My best friend and I did the “Desert Island Discs” game the other day. We created a shortlist of 10 and a finalist list of 5 for the music, movies, and books categories, with the added rule (stolen from the radio Desert Island Discs program) that the Bible and Shakespeare are already on the island. These are the books, DVDs, and albums that (at this point) we would want with us forever.

It was really difficult, and actually a little surprising. I’m a big fan of doing things like this every so often, to see how your tastes have changed over time – and sometimes how they haven’t, even if you think they have. Some of my favourites – most-played songs, most-watched films, books that I love – did not make the list. If they were songs, then the whole album wasn’t worth it; books were emotional in perhaps the wrong way (Hardy, I’m looking at you), films I’d watched so many times that even looking at them makes the whole thing play in my head.

It’s also quite challenging. Do you pick your “comfort” items? Things that you’ve been meaning to get to but haven’t had the time? A combination of the two? Is length a consideration? (For example, if it comes down to a choice between two books by your favourite author, do you pick the longer one?) Do series count as separate items, or one item total? What about “collected works” or anthologies or single-volume sets?

It was challenging, but here’s my final list. I say final, but really it’s just final as of last week when we did this. Lists like this are so dependent on mood and state of mind that it’s entirely possible that my list will change again tomorrow.

Books:

Finalists – A Room with a View (E.M. Forster), Bet Me (Jennifer Crusie), An Equal Music (Vikram Seth), Persuasion (Jane Austen), The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer)

Runners-Up – Rilla of Ingleside (L.M. Montgomery), The Robin Hood Handbook, Bellwether (Connie Willis), The Blue Castle (L.M. Montgomery), War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)

Comments – I went with the comfort items on this list, for the most part. A Room with a View is my favourite book ever, and every time I read it I find something new in it. Bet Me is also one of my comfort books; I find it nearly perfect. An Equal Music is one of the best books I’ve ever read that shows what it’s like to be a musician. Persuasion is my favourite Jane Austen, even beating Pride and Prejudice, in part because of the letter at the end which is one of the most romantic letters in all of fiction. The Canterbury Tales makes the list for two reasons: I couldn’t go without something in Middle English, and I’ve never actually read the whole thing. So, in a way, it’s both a comfort book and a challenge book.

I was torn between The Canterbury Tales and The Robin Hood Handbook – Robin is my historical fictional boyfriend, after all – but ultimately decided that Chaucer had more variety. The Montgomery books are also wonderful, and comfort books for me, but not quite as meaty as the finalists. Bellwether is my favourite Connie Willis book, and there to satisfy the sci-fi/specfic side of me. And War and Peace is on the list purely for length – I liked it a lot when I read it and it would keep me entertained for quite a while. But it doesn’t come up to the personal emotion of the finalists.

Films:

Finalists – Singin’ in the Rain, Bend It Like Beckham, The Empire Strikes Back, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Pride and Prejudice

Runners-up – North and South, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Lion in Winter, Ratatouille, Beauty and the Beast

Comments – This is a list that changes almost every minute. It’s like picking your favourite child. It was actually harder to narrow this list down than it was for the books! But the first three are my all-time favourite films, than I can, have, and will watch over and over and over again, sometimes in the same day. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is the “funny one” of the Indy movies, plus it features Sean Connery. And it doesn’t matter which of the (more recent) Pride and Prejudices it is. I adore both Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen.

Any of the runners-up could easily make the list on any given day, depending on mood and how recently I’ve seen or been reminded of that particular movie. And there are many more that could make the shortlist, again depending on day, mood, and proximity.

Music:

Finalists – Romeo and Juliet (Prokofiev), Ninth Symphony (Beethoven), Wicked, Carmen (Bizet), Revolver (The Beatles)

Runners –up – Amahl and the Night Visitors (Menotti), Abbey Road (The Beatles), Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (The Beatles), Led Zeppelin IV, Joshua Tree (U2)

Comments – This is where I surprised myself. I thought I was moving away from classical music and more towards pop/rock/alt stuff. But it turns out, when picking the albums to go with me onto a fictional desert island for the rest of my life, I go back to my roots. Romeo and Juliet is my favourite of the Prokofiev ballets, or really orchestral music in general. Beethoven’s 9^th is, without a doubt, the most perfect creation of musical structure, themes, instrumentation, and just everything that has ever been performed ever. Carmen is my favourite opera. Wicked is currently my singalong musical, although depending on mood it could easily be another one; I do need something in my range to sing along with, though. And Revolver is my current favourite Beatles album.

I really debated between the three Beatles albums that I had on the shortlist. All three of them are amazing, and are the three that I listen to all the way through, without skipping. Sgt. Pepper is even my stated all-time favourite Beatles album. But for some reason in my subconscious, possibly because it has one of my favourite tracks, Revolver was the one that I chose to come with me. Led Zeppelin IV is partially on the list for my rock interests, but as it turned out it didn’t hold a candle to the others. And Amahl is wonderful, but very occasion-specific. I sometimes listen to it when it’s not Christmas time, but I listen to Carmen all year long.

As previously stated, these lists are only valid for the day and time that we did them; they are subject to change based on mood and experience. But it’s an interesting exercise nonetheless. Have you ever done the Desert Island Discs game?

Football thoughts

The Pro Bowl was last night, and I listened to it as I fell asleep. Here's a question: is there anyone who takes the Pro Bowl seriously? Most of the players weren't, and the announcers certainly weren't. Here's the next question: do we need to?

There's been a lot of talk this year (....at least, from the two Sports Illustrated writers I follow, and from NFL.com) about the relevance of the Pro Bowl and the perception of the Pro Bowl, etc., etc. A lot of players withdrew because of either the Super Bowl or injury. Players were still being named to the squads in the week leading up to the Pro Bowl. Is the Pro Bowl still important? Still necessary?

I don't follow any other professional sports league as avidly as I follow the NFL, so I don't know what reaction their All-Star games get. I know that MLB's All-Star game comes in the middle of the season, but I don't know anything about the NBA or NHL's All-Star games. I'm assuming they each have one. (Perhaps someone who does follow these sports can help me compare?)

Because that's all that the Pro Bowl is: an All-Star game. And it doesn't need to have this great import or significance. It's the best players of the season (for a certain level of "best" this year, admittedly), playing the game that they love to play, in a game that has no significance other than bragging rights. That's the point. The emotional investment, for players and for fans, isn't in winning or losing: it's just in the game.

And you could tell that, at least from the Westwood One announcers last night. They were just a bunch of guys sitting around, talking about football, and oh, yeah, there was a game going on too and wow did you see that play? I don't think they used those exact words, but pretty close. They were guys who liked football and each other. That was why they were there, and that came through over the airwaves.

(I suppose they're not airwaves if it's digital and online and stuff, is it? I'll stop obsessing over pedantry now.)

Last night's Pro Bowl was definitely an offensive battle: the defense was almost non-existent. And that's also okay: you'd hate either to have or cause a potential career-ending injury in the Pro Bowl (or a pre-season game: the same emotional attitudes apply). And, again, it's just a game for the enjoyment of the game. Not that I don't enjoy good defense, but highlight reels are made for long runs and beautiful spiral passes, with the occasional interception and kick or punt return thrown in. (I did hear that there was an interesting lateral play? I think one of the SI writers said something about Benny Hill....?)

I don't know how to "fix" the perception of the Pro Bowl; I don't know if it's better or worse to have it before the Super Bowl or in Miami instead of Honolulu. But I do know that it doesn't need all the hand-wringing that I've seen over the last few weeks. Maybe it's not the Pro Bowl's problem - maybe our expectations need to be adjusted instead.

Moooooooooooooooom, I'm booooooooooored.......

There was an article in the New York Times about boredom recently. It started with the fact that book reviews rarely use the word “boring”, even if the book in question is, meandered through the history of boredom and contemporary culture’s attitude toward boredom, and concludes with boredom in literature (specifically David Foster Wallace’s new book).

Boredom is something that I’ve thought about quite a lot recently, like within the last year or so. For me, at least, boredom is not a case of having nothing to do – it’s a case of low motivation and not wanting to do what you do have to do, or not being able to decide what to do (a big problem for me right now). Having nothing to do is boring, but you can justifiably fill the time with mindless entertainment or something. For me, boredom has a mild frustration element – of wanting to have nothing to do, of not being able to focus, of not having the panic of deadlines pushing me to finish things.

It’s lack of interest, mostly. Lack of interest in the things on my to-do list. Lack of interest in what’s going on in the world, in my life. When it comes to boring books or movies, lack of interest in what’s going on in the story. It’s not necessarily something inherent in the book or movie, although it might be. What is profoundly uninteresting to me might be fascinating to someone else, and vice versa.

The article brings up some good points about boredom – how it was created by the rise of the middle class, leisure time, and individualism born out of the Industrial Revolution. People pre-Industrial Revolution might have been bored, but not quite in the same way that people post-Industrial Revolution were. The argument, sort of, is that it took the rise of leisure time for people to realize that boredom was a possibility, that you were responsible for filling your own time and that you could enjoy what you did.

One of the references in the article is to a recent study that shows the neurological patterns of a “resting mind” – they analyzed the patterns of people in an fMRI machine who were told to “just relax” and empty their minds. For a lot of people, that is boring – but for me, at least for a while, it would be relaxing. I wouldn’t have to worry that I’m supposed to be doing something else, that I’m missing out on something. Of course, after a while, forced inactivity does become boring – but again, it’s because you can’t stop thinking of the things that you should or could be doing instead.

(I’m not sure if this post is turning out the way that I wanted it to…..I may have to revisit it at some point and rewrite….)

Are you a megalosaurus?

Today has been a book day for me. I am slowly making my way through my saved items on Google Reader, and this morning I read through some of the book items. Most of them were book reviews (there's a biography of Chopin that looks interesting; the new Elizabeth Kostova got panned).

The topic of interest over the last few months, and especially yesterday, has been e-readers. Yesterday, as everyone who has turned on a computer probably knows, Apple revealed the iPad. And most of the immediate online reaction has been to the name. (What hasn't been to the name has been "So....it's a bigger iPhone. That's not a phone.") Personally, I'm a little disappointed that Apple didn't go with iTablet or iSlate - I especially liked iSlate, and I think that iPad is too similar to iPod to really distinguish it effectively. But, really, couldn't they have foreseen the jokes? The jokes that I've seen are mostly feminine-product-related (the iPad will come in Mini, Regular, and Maxi, etc.) with a few Star Trek (iPadd, Paramount should sue) ones thrown in. But, like I said to a friend online, in a few weeks the name will be normal and worth nothing more than a wry smile (if that). So if you're going to mock it, do it now.

I also sought out a new second-hand bookstore today; I'd heard about it on Tuesday when I was volunteering at Oxfam. It's just up the street from the town square, so about a fifteen-minute walk at most from my house. It also seems to be staffed by volunteers, so no chance for a job, but any bookstore is a good thing in my mind (although sad: no income means an absolute moratorium on book buying, and I need to get through the books that I already own and haven't read anyway). I met a sweet but loopy woman who declared her love for the Sweet Valley High books, and who also gave me job advice. It took me about ten minutes to extract myself from the conversation.

There's also a couple of book articles from the last few days that I think I want to either keep around or talk more about; I'll try to work those up tonight and post them on the other blog sometime soon.

Randomness:

I found a flowchart online detailing whether you should eat food that has been dropped on the floor. It is very comprehensive - including questions such as "Are you a megalosaurus?"

A friend also posted a pun - I don't think it's originally his but it's very funny.

I sent off my final assessment for my proofreading course; now I need to start on the copy-editing part of it. I've also been doing some stuff (volunteer, of course. I need to get into a field that pays me) on the proofreading site for Project Gutenberg. I'm still a beginner on that site, but it's pretty addicting. I have actually been limiting my time on it because I'm supposed to be looking for jobs and things....

My sleeping patterns are totally screwed up. It's almost like I'm jetlagged, except I haven't been out of the UK since October, and haven't even been out of Nottingham since New Year's. I'm hoping that I can stay awake all day today (no napping!) and fall asleep at and stay asleep for a reasonable time. It seems to be going pretty well so far.

I should probably get back to working on something. Focus on one of my writing projects and get at least a few hundred words written.

Jasper Fforde is awesome, and random encounters

Last night I went to hear Jasper Fforde speak about his new book, Shades of Grey. It was fantastic. I'd also let one of my friends know; we didn't exactly go together, but there was still an empty seat next to me when he arrived, so we hung out during and after.

The book's been on sale this week at Waterstone's - half-price - and the ticket price for the event could go toward the book, so I only paid six quid on the night for the book. Which I was very excited about, because (a) I don't have an income right now, and (b) I doubt that it'll even be that cheap in a year or so when it comes out in paperback.

Jasper Fforde was very personable and funny. He talked about his path to becoming a writer, about the book (including a few passages), and answered questions. Some paraphrased quotations:

"After stealing - sorry, paying homage - to other people's ideas, I decided to write my own story with my own characters."

"Writing is a series of challenges or dares - a bit like Scottish cuisine."

"Because I'm the author, and I can do whatever I want, I generally do."

"Writing is never finished, only abandoned."

He also mentioned his publication schedule, which is a book every year for at least the next three. He didn't say a lot about the sequel to Shades of Grey, but the next Thursday Next book and especially the next Nursery Crimes Division book (which isn't scheduled until 2013) sound fascinating. The most recent NCD book, The Fourth Bear, also sounds fascinating ("How is the porridge different temperatures when it was poured at the same time?"), and it's the only other one of his that I haven't read yet.

He signed books afterwards. James and I started off in what turned out to be the buying line, but switched to the signing line once we realized. We were chatting when one of the three girls in front of us asked if I was American. I said I was, and asked where they were from. Minnesota, Chicago....are you the Luther group? And they were. We talked the whole rest of the way to the front of the line.

Jasper Fforde in person was very friendly and cheerful, even after almost an hour of signing. I can't wait to read this book (I got to chapter three before the talk started).....and everything else that he ever writes.

My goals

They're not "New Year's Resolutions," because it's already January 17th. They're not deadlines, because I have a problems sticking to self-imposed deadlines. They're goals. Goals that will hopefully not be too onerous to meet, that are flexible enough to allow for my current schedule and social life (ha), and that should eventually lead to the ever-elusive income. And they are "at least" goals, so I can exceed them if I want to and can.

They are to apply for at least two jobs every day, and to write at least 500 words on something that is not a blog every day. I'm getting better about getting in the habit of writing, and the words are coming more easily, but it's far too easy to blather on for 1100 words about football or something and not make any progress on my long-term plans.

So, those are my goals.

An excursion

I went on an excursion today. A new art museum opened in November, Nottingham Contemporary, and its first exhibits are closing in a week or so. I’ve been meaning to go since it opened, and decided to take today to do so. It got me out of the house for a little while, and then I could be in town and hit the pound-or-less stores for Dr. Pepper and Pepsi, and go to Waterstone’s which is always a good time and relaxing for me (even though I have put a sort of moratorium on luxury spending which, until I get through all the books that I currently own, includes books. It does not, however, include a ticket to an author event from one of my favourite current writers. On Wednesday. For three pounds.)

Anyway. Nottingham Contemporary. It is, without a doubt, one of the ugliest designed buildings I’ve ever seen. For a long time, when I walked by it, I thought it was the scaffolding hiding the building, something that would come down to reveal the museum when it was done. It is growing on me a little bit, but it suffers in comparison to its neighbours – it’s right next to Pitcher and Piano, an excellent restaurant/cocktail bar in a converted church. It’s one of the most beautiful buildings in the area, and the art museum looks squat and ugly next to it. Close up, one can see the lace patterns on the outside of the museum, a nice nod to Nottingham’s history and the history of that particular neighborhood. However, you can’t see that unless you’re close up – even from across the street you can’t see the detail. And I haven’t even mentioned the Vegas strip/’50s diner style neon sign that points to the thing. It’s kind of unbelievable how badly this museum does not fit in with its surroundings.

But, anyway, I’ve wanted to go there since it opened, and today I took the opportunity. No point in just lying around the house all day, and then wishing I’d gone, right? Of course, I was not the only one who had that idea today. The place was much more crowded than I was expecting. Of course, it’s a rainy Saturday, so I don’t know why I was surprised, but it’s also Nottingham. I’ve never had a problem with crowds when I’ve gone to the museums here before. If anything, I’ve had a problem with undercrowding – when my sister and I went to the Galleries of Justice over Christmas, we were the only people there, and on a performance tour that gets interesting.

The exhibits themselves were pretty good, I thought. I’m not a huge fan of modern art, but this was a lot more representational than a lot of the stuff at, say, the Tate Modern. Two artists are featured currently: David Hockney, a name I’ve actually heard of, and Frances Stark, an American collage artist. Frances Stark’s work was in the first two galleries, one of her earlier work and one of more recent pieces, and David Hockney was in the other two galleries, which featured his work from 1960-1968 which covered his first trip to America.

Frances Stark’s first phase, if that’s the appropriate word to use, is collages made up primarily of words and pictures; the second phase used more images. I preferred the first gallery, quite a bit actually. The words, and the letters of the words, formed essential parts of the collages. Words were repeated almost ad infinitum to form the patterns in some of them, kind of like this:

t t t t t

h h h h h

e e e e e

My favourite of the ones in this gallery was one called “And also another one at the same time”, which used the words “And also another one at the same time, not” to form what looked like the trunks of trees, and then near the top the letters turn into birds. It’s kind of Escher-esque in the way that one thing turns into another – although it’s not quite so deliberate and subtle as Escher. The demarcation between the letters and the birds is quite clear, but there’s still that sense of motion, of transformation. And, as I said, from a distance at least, they look like trees.

The David Hockney galleries were much more crowded than the Frances Stark ones, both in terms of works of art and of people. There wasn’t as much room to move, because there was just so much more there, which meant that even if the number of people was the same, it seemed like more. I think, though, that there really were more people in the David Hockney rooms. I also realized my invisibility power, or whatever it is about me that says, “Please walk right in front of me and stop, especially if I’m trying to read the panels or look at the artwork in detail.” I managed to keep my frustration in check, though, and look at/read everything that I wanted to in the depth that I wanted to.

I have a few more favourites among the David Hockney works than among the Frances Stark works, even though overall I think I am more interested in Frances Stark’s style. Some of the ones I liked were “Great Pyramid at Giza with Broken Head from Thebes” (I want to go to Egypt. Also I have been listening to Doctor Who audio books that feature an Egyptian princess) and the ones that show him experimenting with water: Man Taking Shower in Beverly Hills, Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool (light reflecting in water as well as the glass of the sliding doors), and A Bigger Splash (so very active, for a static painting). The one with the coolest story, I thought, was “The First Marriage (A Marriage of Styles I)”: he was at a museum with a friend, and had fallen behind a bit. He saw the friend ahead of him, standing near a statue and looking in the same direction as the statue, and it seemed like the friend and the statue were looking at the same thing, as if they were together. So he painted the idea of it. I thought that one was cool.

The gift shop was a test of my willpower, just like Waterstone’s – there was the usual spread of art and cultural studies books (Derrida and the like), and a few shelves of Nottingham interest (i.e. Byron and Lawrence…they had a couple of Sillitoe books, but not Saturday Night and Sunday Morning which is the one I really want to read first), and quite a good selection of children’s books (Emily Gravett is everywhere around here, and they also had the true story of the Big Bad Wolf, which is hilarious). There was also the typical art museum jewelry and bags and things that look “artistic” – one set that was actually pretty cool was jewelry based around shadow puppets. Maybe at some point, when I have an income, I will splurge.

I am looking forward to seeing what else Nottingham Contemporary puts on. It probably won’t be a place I go all the time, but it will definitely be a place I go back to.

Football talk

The NFL playoffs started this last weekend. “My” teams – the Vikings and the Saints, since the Steelers didn’t make the playoffs this year – don’t play until this weekend, but I love football and I’m going to miss football when it’s over for the year so I’m trying to saturate myself while I can. One of the best investments I’ve made this last year is the NFL.com Field Pass access – radio coverage for all the games, plus archives for a while.

That being said, WHAT HAPPENED THIS WEEKEND? I slept through most of the Saturday games (stupid time zone…..) but I caught the first half of the Ravens/Patriots game and where were the Patriots? They certainly weren’t in Foxborough. 24 points in the first quarter? REALLY? And then the Packers/Cardinals game – I may have to get the archived coverage of that and find out WHAT HAPPENED at the end there (it was past my bedtime so I missed the ending). Highest-scoring playoff game in history? Overtime? What?

I hope that the Vikings and the Saints both do well next weekend. I don’t care so much about the AFC this year – the Steelers missed the playoffs, and I’m a sort of fan of New England, who lost this weekend, and was hoping for good things from the Bengals, who lost this weekend, and the Colts have been nearly unstoppable so far so I’m not too worried about them. But the Vikings and the Saints both have histories of choking at horribly inconvenient times, and I really want an NFC team in the Super Bowl that I care about.

Online round-up!

There are a fair number of tabs up on my browser right now. Let’s see what I can get rid of:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/6952220/Why-were-in-the-grip-of-medieval-mania.html

Okay, let’s get one thing clear. Tudor and medieval, as periods, are not the same thing. Don’t conflate them, or the medievalists and Tudor specialists are going to kick your ass. We have studied close combat. I write about music and musicians and romances, and I have studied close combat. There is such a huge difference between the fourteenth century and the sixteenth. When I say I am studying “medieval literature”, no, I don’t mean “like Shakespeare.” They are not even close to the same thing.

Basically, this article…sucks. He seems to think that an interest in anything pre-19^th century is unusual and worth remarking on, even as he says that it’s always been popular, and even as he remarks – twice – that ancient history is just as popular (although he only refers to two writers on ancient history, and one of those two he uses twice). He also only uses two publishing events and the new V&A exhibit that are actually medieval to establish his “mania” and “obsession” with the medieval period (three if you count Wolf Hall, which is Tudor) – and completely ignores the continuing success of the Georgian and Victorian periods in literature.

Skimming this article a couple of days ago, I was annoyed. Reading it more carefully, it just makes me angry.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/simonheffer/6957419/The-true-great-20th-century-novelists-who-irked-the-Bloomsbury-snobs.html

Am I just in a bad mood? This article annoyed me as well. Of course, he put me off almost instantly by praising Joyce and deriding Lawrence. (Not denying that Lawrence had “carnal obsessions” but HELLO, Joyce was obsessed by the body to the point of nausea. At least I find it nauseating.)

He makes a fair point about the snobbery of Bloomsbury and the focus in schools on the modernist movement to the exclusion of the Bloomsbury enemies (Wells, Bennett, etc.), but is it really fair to denounce Bloomsbury for propping themselves up at the expense of others and then do that exact same thing? There must be a way for Galsworthy et al to regain some measure of respect and popularity without having to put down Bloomsbury and the other modernists first.

http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2009/02/demetri-martins-palindrome-poem.html

Palindromes are awesome! I know this is from nearly a year ago, but I just heard about it recently. Also, Demetri Martin is cute and funny.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=computers-cant-show-you-the-monet-10-01-04

This is just cool, and proof, of sorts, that computers are not going to take over the world any time soon, because there is still a place for emotion and emotional response.

In which I play with books

Well, my last few posts were depressing and horrible. Or, rather, horribly depressing. Good news! I went to the doctor, I got happy pills, I got my appetite back, and I feel like I can do things again.

Like enter a short story contest.

One of the things I do with my time is play with books. That sounds facetious. I volunteer at a charity shop (Cancer Research UK) and organize their book donations. We try not to have goods on the shop floor for more than a couple of weeks – after that, they get “culled” and go to one of the other shops in town, to get to a new customer base or something like that. So after I sort through the donations, I go through the books on the shelves, pulling the old ones. Then I price and set out new books from the donations.

It’s quite the process, really. I have so much power over these books! I decide whether they are in good enough condition to go out on the shelves (if they’re not, they get recycled in some way), or recent enough. Fiction isn’t a problem, of course, but textbooks and travel books especially – if they’re not from the 21^st century, I toss them. I tossed one today that was a guide to Windows 95. I’m assuming that no one needs a user’s guide to Windows 95 for anything other than nostalgia value. Sometimes I feel bad about some of the travel guides, especially – it can be really interesting to see the differences in tourist advice, or popular areas, or prices over the years. But there’s a point when it’s interesting and a window where it’s too recent to be interesting, too old to be relevant. That window is when I put them in the big white bag.

I have a system of sorts for the storage room, too. Most of the books we get are, of course, fiction. They go on the built in shelves on the outside wall. They’re organized by size rather than anything else, purely for ease of stacking and access. Mass-market paperbacks are on the lowest shelf, just under eye-height, then trade paperbacks (slightly bigger, with slightly harder covers), and then on the top shelf are the large paperbacks – the ones that I’ve seen now as “airport editions” and things like that. Also on the top shelf are some of the non-fiction paperbacks: history, biography, etc. Basically that wall is for anything that you – I – would check out of a library.

Hardcovers are on the other wall, kind of in the same way. Fiction in one area, non-fiction in another. And then we have the reference/specialty books. Diet books, cookbooks (so many cookbooks), gardening books, bird-watching, languages, basically anything that doesn’t fit in with the other categories. They get a shelf of their own, with cookbooks getting a stack on the shelf right by the door. (Seriously. So many cookbooks.)

Kids books are separated into the ones that can go in the 50p bin (picture books, etc.) and the ones that are more for tweens and young adults, which are priced about the same as adult books are. We got a box a couple of months ago that was stacked full to overflowing with teen-girl type books. Some of them are still in the box. I’m shifting them as quickly as I can.

I’m shifting all the books as quickly as I can, really. We have five and a half shelves on the shop floor for books – three of them usually have paperbacks of various sizes, one has hardcover, and one has miscellaneous non-fiction, with a half-shelf near toys for the tween/young adult books. We sell quite a lot of books, and cull quite a lot on a regular basis, but the storage room never seems to diminish.

And some of that is because of days like today. I walked in today and I could not enter the book storage room. We’d gotten so many donations over Christmas (the last time I was in was December 22) that there was literally nowhere else to put the books. It took me at least two hours just to get things sorted, and I was absolutely ruthless about recycling books. If there was any doubt about condition or suitability, into the white recycling bag it went. I then put something like 60 books on the shelves – and one of my fellow volunteers had already done two shelves.

There were three or four boxes full of books today, as well as the mass of bags. I think they were part of an estate sale or something like that. They were nearly all older books, with quite a lot of cookbooks and gardening books and wine-making and things like that. This was one of the times that it was difficult for me to be ruthless when throwing them out (or not), even though I knew I had to be. I kept thinking of my grandparents’ house, which was, and I’m sure is still, crammed to the rafters with books. The collection reflects so much about my grandparents: their interests, hobbies, activities, and so on. I could tell, going through these boxes, what the person who’d had this collection was like in a similar way. I could picture my grandparents’ books going through the same treatment (once the family has pulled out the ones we personally want of course) – sorting through my grandparents’ lives with only minimal consideration for the emotion and history of the books, only looking at how saleable they are. I know it’s necessary, but it’s still difficult.