all the sons and daughters - part i

[post divided retroactively]

it's been a long week, and it's almost over. on sunday, the second semester begins. i'm precisely two pages closer to the twenty or thirty that i am required to submit in the next two weeks. a stuffy nose and the odd cough tell me that i'm coming down with something, and i severely hope that i'm wrong. *cough*

the week. backwards. and in a bit of a rush:

---wednesday:

dorian gray is a beautiful destruction of all that is good in the book. the changes were entirely unnecessary and all to the detriment of the story. great atmosphere, though. the actual story would have been handled wonderfully.

witnessing fighting on the other side of the road with a mouth full of shuwarma in the rain.

another fun creative writing workshop. i got all sorts of criticism on this is no time for an orgy, but it was appreciated. i'm intrigued that everyone thinks this is stuff i care about. i guess if i had time to write fiction i'd be taking those efforts instead.

paper time! i got a whole two pages done. to be fair, the introduction is probably the trickiest bit as i've already done all the hard work. i hope.

getting work out of the way: and the task list keeps on growing. at least i billed before the month was technically out - if things go as planned, i'll be back in black by the end of the month :)

early night, late morning. it was a blustery day - stormy and windy enough to make me incredibly glad that i didn't have to go to the office. i did have to take the dog for a walk, though, and i really didn't want to get out of bed. i tried to study some more after breakfast, but distraction set in.

---tuesday:

hannah and her sisters is sweet. a lot of the characters' stupidity is painful to watch, though.
another evening of "i just wanna do nothing".

the vampire game was very, very cool. especially a private scene wherein my character was chained up in a room. my fairly weak, nerdy tremere. who just so happened to be able to conjure a spike and blood-boost his strength enough to free himself, grab the chains, put a corpse in his place and wait behind the door for his captor to enter the room. the sense of success was broken slightly by scrapper forcing me to role-play a really tough decision following that. getting into fictitious characters' heads is tough!

the no-can-do dentist delay: they called in the morning to ask if i could reschedule for a half an hour later, and i said no. i arrived ten minutes early (after an hour of travel), and was informed that i was the first on the list. fifteen minutes later i realized that somebody was being seen to and it wasn't me. "oh! we're terribly sorry, she must have snuck in!"
and you didn't think to check her name? thanks a bunch. could-have-dones included eating or drinking since breakfast, more work, and an earlier gaming session.

i got some tricky, pedantically demanding work done. i am well impressed by chrome's sign-in and sync functionality. speaking of which, there're new privacy issues with google. and i don't care. not because i don't think that privacy is important - i do - but so far the company has used my private info to make my personal experience better. i'll begin bitching when i think they're selling me out.

i began the day being forced to eat my hat on the health aspects of veganism. i'm not going to stop eating meat entirely, but i am going to shift my consumption to a lower gear and take pills instead.

---monday:

due to the weather forecast we went rollerblading a day early. it was a solid blade, even though we've been lazy for the longest time, and we finished it with delicious vaniglia ice-cream. i sat too long on the internets instead of going to bed directly :/

it was a really, really cold evening.
after dinner, panty and stocking turned out to be a great enough disappointment that i deleted the rest of the season without prejudice. and the first episodes were so promising!
went to pg's parents to say goodbye and pick up the dog, they'll be gone for a couple of weeks.
on the way home i visited the library, they'd sent me an email informing me that the book i'd requested had arrived. i get the feeling i'm the only person writing on shakespeare: did i scare everyone else off? while reading the intro i was reminded of a hint in one of the early sonnets that partially explains the dark mistress' identity ^_^

[continued...]

the down-wedding - part ii

... continued

friday:

a late-ish morning. i need to sleep more, not just lie in bed feeling tired. i started off visiting hardware dude to pick up cheap paint and a roller (that was more expensive than i was hoping), dropped that off at my apartment before bringing over a couple of things, switching from blades to shoes and heading back to clean the air-conditioner and paint. it took me a while to figure out that i have no clue how to clean the a/c, but fortunately i guessed right and ran it until it (apparently) cleaned itself.

painting was quick and painless, washing the roller afterwards was not. i pulled out all the nails and plastered in the holes, dusted quite a bit and then returned home to pick up my netbook and notes and head to coffeeholic for a great lunch, reading for sunday's exam and being exposed to an intriguing discussion of a class-action suit against strauss for producing the cream for their "milky" dessert range using fish-bones. the central issue is that some religious extremists have placed such crazy restrictions over and above those defined by the "kashrut" laws that they consider this mixture of fish and milk to be unkosher.

idiots.

not even the coffee could save me, and i returned for a quick shower and a nap that turned into the sleep of the dead - only pg felt i'd slept enough and made a monumental effort to drag me back from the nothing.

---i had a quick planning chat with my mum, sat agitated over dinner (i don't know why) and just before we left to the cinema i received an email that astounded me (translated from hebrew):

Hey totalwaste
What's going on.

I wanted to ask [of your dignity? in your estimation? from your sense of honour?] if possible and I thank [your dignity? your estimation? your sense of honour?] for your material in the English courses:
Shakespeare, Amercan [sic] Culture, Narrative Analysis and its tutorial, English Culture, Poetry Analysis and its tutorial, Introduction to Theory,

Thanks in advance

i haven't a clue who the sender is - the name on the mail claims "you can only go as far as you push" and the email address spells rubbish. so i don't have a clue who this is, nor what my dignity and honour have to do with anything, nor why they want my notes (or did they really mean material, like reading lists and pdfs?) for courses taken last semester, nor why i should even consider doing them any favours. i mean... wow.

---pg doesn't remember the smurfs. and i can't find them anywhere. except here. or here, where we can't buy them :/

we watched priest. priest frikkin' ROCKS. i don't remember where i read a review that made it seem like it suffered from crapiplotitus, but that's what i was expecting, not the exquisitely beautiful rendering of a fairly interesting combination of vampire narratives into a gorgeous mesh of comic and non-comic forms.

two previews formed an integral part of the priest experience. immortals looks breathtaking, and the upcoming remake of fright night excites me no end. if i haven't mentioned it before, i saw the original as a six year-old and it absolutely traumatized me, causing me to develop a deep fear of and lust for vampires during my formative years. this is gonna be good :D

---i just did the math - i'll have earned the cash to travel to south africa only by the month that i'll actually be there. that kinda complicates things :/