{ split subject }

eighthblackbird drove up from Irvine today, and we thought we'd do one of those out-of-towner activities: hiking up through Griffith Park to the observatory (the museum itself is closed mondays, but nonetheless). it went like this: the internet told us a place to park, and we forged off into the trails with only the vaguest idea where we were going; not content with the staid dirt roads leading inwards, we followed a tiny path up into hilly terrain; we kept scrabbling up steep slopes, with footholds carved in rainwater rivulets, neither of us wearing proper shoes, wondering when/if we'd reach the top and what would happen when we got there; just as we were about to give up and gingerly backtrack, we DID reach the top, and there WAS a more reasonable path down the other side of the rise, and it DID lead, miraculously, to the observatory!

from the top, we could see that we'd unnecessarily scaled a haphazard little ridge (bottom right - the usual path; middle right - our conquest; left - the plateau where the forking ways meet):


awesome hike, though -- it hit the spot and made us feel adventurous. and the vista from our knoll was spectacular.

( Read more... )



even more pictures!

one of the world's most beautiful days. I'm still speechless.

first, pictures of Seven Falls taken with my cameraphone. (full disclosure: unlike with yesterday's, I did some quick enhancing of these in iPhoto.)



( +16 )

and then my battery died (I ordered a new battery, btw). which was in fact a blessing, because then we relied on the real camera for pictures of the Garden of the Gods. far too many pictures to display here. so if you click the photo of us below (that's still Pike's Peak in the background), it will take you to a flickr slideshow. seriously, this place is magical. I teared up, literally, from the sheer majesty of it.


[selected photos, mostly taken by dad and lori, in backwards order (Garden of the Gods followed by more of Seven Falls)]

so I'm visiting my little brother in Denver, in case you hadn't gathered, and my dad and stepmom are here too. today we took a drive to/through Rocky Mountain National Park, and I almost died of gorgeous. here's my attempt to do it justice with the cameraphone.



( +19 )

did you know that the friendslist only goes back 2 weeks or 980 entries, whichever comes first? if you didn't, count yourself lucky (or better medicated than I am). catching up to the present is going to be a medium-term project, so expect those random outdated comments from me to keep coming.

I've lived here for nearly four years and never knew there was a stunning waterfront park with hiking trails literally blocks from my house. what a travesty!







we found it by accident walking down from scenic Blackstone boulevard, where we met R2D2!!!

scattergories answers have been unscreened. normally one point would be awarded for each correct answer that isn't duplicated by someone else, but that system is dependent on time limits and questions that have correct answers. so instead, I'll be awarding a point for the BEST answer to each question (judged by an extensive and statistically accurate poll of MY BRAIN).

1. stupid things that Americans do :: "liberate" other countries (wearemany) [though I do have to declare iamsab the runner-up for Stop Same-Sex Marriage]
2. girls on TV who are gay in my mind :: necessarily a tie between Starbuck (iamsab) and Laura Roslin (blacksquirrel)
3. things you can cook without using a stove :: Jello! (museumfreak) [Jello does require the boiling of water, but I suppose you CAN do that without a stove. runner-up goes to cosmic for Delivered food! -- certainly the most appealing to non-stove-using people such as myself, but disqualified because technically you don't cook it. in a creepy coincidence, wearemany and blacksquirrel both answered Lemonade]
4. goofy names for nail polish colors :: Stubbornly Sunsettish (iamsab) [this was not the high-concept question, cosmic ;)]
5. conspiracies perpetrated by The Man against Black people :: Low income housing (blacksquirrel)
6. items on the gay agenda :: OK, this one is headed for at least a three-way tie, so you're just going to have to go read them all! it's quite an impressive agenda, IJS.
7. things you can buy at Home Depot :: lawn ornaments (wearemany)
8. lesbians :: Julie! (museumfreak) [OK, it was virtually impossible to beat that one]
9. sex toys :: E-vibes! (for the cyborg in all of us) (infloresence)
10. high-concept Halloween costumes :: Joni Mitchell's album Blue (museumfreak) [but they were all great, so this is mostly because she actually executed said costume!]

and the winner is... museumfreak! *ticker-tape parade*

an outtake: one of happyhop's categories during the RL game was "the worst pets in the world," which elicited the following answers:

martians (me)
midgets (mandysbitch)
maggots (Jess)
and... minotaurs (happyhop)

I was laughing so hard that I literally ROFLOLed. painful hilarity!

*

of course, I couldn't resist whipping out the smartphone once or twice while we were touristing in DC.



( as seen on the West Wing! (National Cathedral picspam) )

p.s. holy guh, THIS is why you should watch Rome. hot femmes fatales pitted against each other in a matriarchal deathmatch! (and a reminder: in S.1 there was a crossgen lesbian affair -- we're talking onscreen here, not the specially-wired TV in my brain)

there's almost nothing I love more than being surrounded by the thick twang of a quebecois accent, than waking my brain up to forgotten words and phrases, than a truly bilingual city, where in every shop you're greeted "bonjour hi." visiting in the summer, I wonder why I haven't moved here long ago, and then we hit a cold and rainy august sunday and I remember. it's the projectjulie and laliu show here in montreal, as our other school buddies who came for the wedding have either departed or been folded into family time. instead of venturing back out in the damp, we just marathonned four hours of BSG -- KLG2 through The Farm -- and I fell in love with the craft of this arc all over again: such elegance of multi-threaded pacing. the back half of the season shows even worse in comparison -- you can see all the frayed continuity (where the frak is the theology?? do the geminese not care about their dying prophet's miracle cure? is the cylon god as confused as he seems, or is Six just pulling augury out of her ass?). it doesn't give me much faith that TPTB can pull off TV anything like that good with S.3.

tomorrow the summer is ending, as I'm en route back to Providence via Westchester (long trip, long story -- basically the other car in the caravan is full). I'm more than ready to stop this running around (what are you running away from? my mother asks), but I'm bringing a cold (or probably my biannual sinus infection, at this point, which can't be cured until I come home to my antibiotics on tuesday), so that makes me cranky. wish me bon voyage.

I have been asked to offer an independent review of casa ass_whisperer and 3dogcircus, and the surrounding region. I give it FIVE STARS! *****


their woods harbor evocative, occult sculptures made of melted army men and other plastics. we hung that hammock (and accept no liability for injuries [bodily or metaphorical]).

( it comes with three dogs )

plus, we went on a field trip to the Ulster County Fair in New Paltz!

( the food was really the highlight, for me, but everyone else liked the pigs best )

ra and julie kayaking in Portland! featuring Fort Gorges (ARRR!) and Mackworth Island (which has a fairy village and the graves of Gov. Baxter's dogs and horse). julie's shoes fell apart and she had to tie them onto her feet with plastic bag strips!

I am devoted to my grandparents, but this is one of the most difficult places to be. I've sussed out some open wireless next door, halleluia, so I'm carting my laptop over to the corner of the yard in shifts to huddle in a plastic chair with the mosquitos until my battery dies (I get maybe one hour -- old computer). that's my lifeblood, in the air -- it was mildly terrifying when I couldn't get the dial-up working.

oh, my grandparents. they're barely coping. nana had a fall this morning, and really it wasn't much of a problem to get her upright and back into the wheelchair, but she completely panicked and froze and cried for an hour afterwards about how she wishes she'd died when she had the stroke. and on her good days, she says "I'm determined to beat this" -- it's permanent brain damage, she's never going to have greater mobility. she can walk, painstakingly, and she walked all around the yard again afterwards. but she can't walk in public because she gets embarrassed and flustered. she should be seeing a therapist, but that's never going to happen, and she categorically refuses to take her anti-depressants. papa is too frail to help much, and mostly refuses to see doctors. so they rent a car every other weekend to go to the grocery store and the casino and otherwise don't leave the house. I mean, I can't even begin to describe their level of crazy. hard, but they have two sons in-state to manage them and it's not my job.

plus I talked to my dad. I'm going to eta the dad post when I'm reunited with the internets.

today (the above was written last night, now) Aunt Winnie gave me $20 and I doubled it, pretty much due to one hit on the Fairy Fortune machine where I mistakenly played 25 cents per credit instead of a penny (one pull is 20 credits), and I hit for 100 credits. lucky.

I watched some TV by accident. I feel bad being on the computer ALL day (writing my HAIRGATE piece) and there's only so long I can talk to them -- TV is at least marginally interactive, and I didn't download enough to get us through the week. so I watched Dead Like Me for the first time, and yet again michellek wins at the mediasphere because she knew all along. the women on this show are so delightful, quirky and rich and unexpectedly beautiful. George/Betty could be an OTP, though with all this BARW stuff I feel guilty that I picked out the two white girls. and now I'm apparently watching Eureka again, against my better judgement. JO BE MY GIRLFRIEND! she's ridiculously gorgeous, for serious -- way hotter with a uniform and a gun than as a femme babymama/lesbian vampire -- and I may really have to write that Jo/Maya doppelcest bunny someday (I need more fanfic projects like a hole in the head). or Jo/Zoe could be my OTP, hahaha, because I'm a perv like that. anyway, this will only make sense to thrace_.

so we said goodbye to Ptown...

( ferry boat pix )

today we took a walk across the Provincetown breakwater.


( 1,000 words )

this is the landscape of West Marin / N. California, where I've spent the weekend. come see MORE PICS FROM TODAY and PICS FROM THE WEDDING!

i. in the end I resolved (brilliantly!) to embrace my virtual existence (as well as my slacker identity) and abandon the notion that I have to be in my apartment with my books in order to prepare my field lists. I gathered up a copy of every syllabus for every course I've taken in grad school (and then some), made a list of the 10 or so additional worthwhile things on my bookshelf, and will be writing (at least the first draft) blind -- in nyc, AFTER I get back from CA. so, I'm off! not returning to provi until mid-July, is the plan. in CELEBRATION of the wireless DSL modem/router that I just set up at my grandparents' beachfront apartment, I am going to tell you a few things. the first is that I stayed up past 5am "packing" last night, as is my wont, and then set the alarm for 8. so I was pretty worthless today (and yet notice how it's after midnight, and I'm still awake). I otherwise could have been writing (or at least scheming -- Six is up), but instead I'll be poking at lj and other things that don't require too much brainpower -- WHILE SITTING ON THE BACK PORCH! at least until I get tired of squinting at the screen, and have to retire back into the air conditioning -- someone should really invent a good solution for outdoor computing.

ii. to rerun a picture from last summer (the light was bad today -- note that this round mom's not showing up until tomorrow), basically this is my view:



( photo chronicle )

iii. in unrelated news, my little bro got a real grown-up job! he's moving to Denver and it's all happening very suddenly. I'm a bit wibbly about him going off on his own, to this part of the world that I've never even been to. if you have any Denver connections that would be useful to a skinny, scruffy 24-year-old straight man, give me a holler -- he knows pretty much nobody there.

iv. I just have to brag (inarticulately) about how cool my friends are and how fantastic this wedding I'm going to next weekend is going to be. it's summer camp! you're so jealous! also note that there's an entry on the politics and meanings of marriage, and a discussion of same as one of the summer camp activities ;)

v. archiving my fortune cookie fortunes (yes, I actually "packed" them in order to do this), because who should be saving little scraps of paper in this day and age?!?

If your desires are not extravagant, they will be granted.
Life to you is a dashing and bold adventure.
Idleness is the holiday of fools. [that was my first one after livewireless spring break *hangs head*]
Your ability to juggle many tasks will take you far.
Success will bless a new venture if you are courageous.
Don't change horses midstream unless horse lies to you and stream is on fire. [that was a promo cookie from http://assesofevil.org]
along those lines, my favorite fortune of all time was: Depart not from the path which gate has assigned you.

did you remember to add "in bed" to the end??

or, what I did on my summer vacation

I haven't written a poem in seven years. only a poem could capture this trip with any economy, for the living of it has sponged up the time for the writing of it. the precision of verse would evoke a riotous technicolor -- starting with infinite whorls of coastline, musk-flavored lifesavers, and a series of treks through rank kitchen alleys in search of cafe toilets (out the back in crumbling tin-roofed sheds, reworked dunnies from before the days of indoor bathrooms). it's the specificities that charm me so completely. inexplicably, Sydney feels like home (as it did once before).

I wrote five of my seven sins, and you can read them in my memories (an index will come, someday, after "sloth" which is about Weeds and "gluttony" which is about Starbuck and Roslin and a cucumber). I didn't write Bad Girls, for which I deserve to be thoroughly flagellated. that story feels ambitious, even if I can keep it to 5x250 words, and will also be written someday.

I got a sunburn tan and new shirts and practice on my Aussie accent. I made everybody want to write girlslash *glares sternly at mandysbitch*. and there are pictures! -- only not all of them until february, as apparently I've exhausted my upload quota for this month.

and YOU -- by which I mean giantessmess and mandysbitch and pene and more briefly sparklebunny and aleatory_6 (faithinthepoor and missmai_chan were narrowly missed) -- there are no words for your loveliness either. a pile of adjectives only goes so far, and people in the flesh deserve more than that.

I'll tell you about the game we played at the fandom convergence, because it's fantastic and I made it up. it's a combination of the board game Balderdash and the "three truths and lie" (or somesuch) meme. let's call it "Liar, Liar." here's how you play (you need pen and paper):

• when it's your turn, you write down a true fact about yourself on a little piece of paper
• everybody else writes down a made-up fact about you on a little piece of paper
• you get all the papers and you crumple and mix them up, and then read them all out
• everybody else votes by secret ballot on which one they think is true
• scoring is as follows: players get one point for every person who guesses their fake fact and one point if they guess the true fact
• go around the circle, repeating for each person

I won the game, btw. XD

and the whole shebang was just as fun as that.

and now I'm back in provi, starting out the semester horrifically behind. I'm going back to xmas-time on the flist to try to relocate yuletide fics, and will work my way forward sloooowly from there. before that I might worry about comments (WOE upon WOE). and/or my course proposal. and NEW TV! I've watched 10 eps of Veronica Mars and I still don't particularly like it. I know, I have NO SOUL. but the fact that Veronica was madly in love with Lilly and flirts shamelessly with every girl of the week certainly did not escape my attention. I'll finish the first season. conversely, now that iamsab has caught me up on House and pointed out the ridiculous hottness of Stacey (and Cuddy too, but mostly Stacey), I've added it to my List. eta: 20 assorted eps to download, folks, and Arrested Development is the funniest show ever made. they asked me to tell you, so I'm telling you.

and etc.

I'm here! the trip was painless (outside one exceptionally moronic incident which I will spare you)! I'm awake! giantessmess is making me lunch! the weather is glorious and we're out in the country and we may just sit around all day and write like the uncool dorks that we are :P

it's a magical thing, this having one dimension of a person and then suddenly having three. I adore it. why does everyone else find it so strange? giantessmess is gorgeous and I am so happy to bring her to sydney with me and introduce her gorgeousness to everyone there.

cheese calls...

i. so, uh, you really couldn't hear the cacophony on my last phonepost, huh? stupid noise-cancelling directional mics! you'll just have to take my word for it. I lost the $20 I'd won, though my bro also turned 15 cents into $12. and I hit for another $6 on the penny machine. all in all, we ended up down about $6, which isn't bad for a day of gambling. um, the family pastime is sort of growing on me.

ii. my cousin's fourth grade class is doing the best project ever: they each picked a stuffed animal who they sent off to travel the world with willing volunteers. said volunteers will send postcards back to the class and make entries in a journal. in this way, they will learn geography. so I've inherited a travel buddy named Mr. Twitters, a small white bunny who is metrosexual, we determined, because he wears a pink ribbon. see photos chronicling his adventures @ http://flickr.com/photos/bunnylog

iii. sent: 105 holiday cards, not including ~8 joint ones that clyde wrote and 10 I had to scrap because I couldn't get any address at all. certain of the addresses I tried were long shots, too, so I imagine some will come back to me. recipients include: mandysbitch, heathers+lonejaguar, eighthblackbird, happyhop, n0r1_h, iamsab+sorlklewis, pene, sscheckter, surblimity, boxmint, myalexandria, ibrakoor, warlordkittens, zazuomgwtf (I forgot to look up your postal code! hope it finds you anyway), boydyke+vegasgrrl24, celeria, mazily, sparklebunny, cabenson, museumfreak, thatfangirl, giantessmess, sinful_ceasar, chyryan_blog, bechover_blog, and tibbers (who, as far as I can tell, is an entirely random person who happened to stumble across my request for addresses) -- should be everyone who asked.

celeria takes the prize for the best card I received. handmade! personalized! TICKY BOXES!

iv. I need a drabble idea. I've decided I should write for my seven deadly sins challenges at femslash100 -- though it's not clear WHEN this writing is going to happen. six must be completed by monday for remainder. I'm planning:

#44 ~ gluttony - Starbuck/Roslin + a cucumber
#45 ~ pride
#46 ~ wrath - Wicked, Elphaba/Dorothy
#47 ~ envy - CJ/Kate/Abbey, after the wedding
#48 ~ sloth - Weeds, Nancy/her lawyer (name?)
#49 ~ greed - Neuromancer, Molly/3jane
#51 ~ lust - Helen/Nikki

so as you see, I've got nothing for Pride. any requests? I don't know if I can actually manage Lou/Annabeth. trying to come up with something rare, but I don't know if any of it is clear enough in my mind, and I don't have time for research. I could default to The Birds, because when I was watching it I thought "wow, this is slashy," and I try to follow through on such thoughts on principle. or possibly I should attempt Mary Poppins or Jean Brodie, both of whom are prideful.

v. eighthblackbird, I'm giving NeoOffice the old college try -- I organized the toolbars so they're livable and I'm willing to overlook the ugly grey interface. but there is no word count feature whatsoever! MS Word keeps a running tally in the status bar, which is crucial to me with all the drabbling. so I think it's a no-go, and I'm doomed to worship the evil empire forever. plus, it keeps trying to get me to save things in its weird format rather than .doc, which isn't going to work if I have to communicate with the population at large.

vi. holiday ficathons! so much tasty goodness and so little time in which to savor it. I'll read all your stories, of course, and many of you are reccing as well, which I appreciate. but given my predilections what I'm most excited about is femslash_today's yuletide femslash masterlist! I'll certainly be getting to all of those... eventually.

vii. in preparation for my adventure, I went back and read the emails I wrote in august 1999, the last time I went to australia. didn't find much info about what I actually did as a tourist, but that era in my life rushed back with startling vividness -- its cacophonous emotions and palpable riot of growth. stories of four different lovers happening roughly simultaneously (five if you count the still-vibrant correspondence with my FL), and I'd forgotten they happened all at once. about the trip, I wrote:

"So Australia. Australia is mind-blowing. It is more like the US than any other country I have ever been in except for Canada. Which only makes the differences, and there are many, stand out and chafe me with how little I understand them. It is so new and weird and post-colonial--still not independent from Britain, in fact. I am focusing on the language right now--the fact that I can understand every word doesn't make it any more strange to be surrounded by a totally different way of talking, and being marked as foreign every time I open my mouth (and only then) is interesting. I'm obsessed with the accent. Morocco [where I had just completed a semester abroad] totally changed my way of being a tourist, and I would rather be doing informal fieldwork than going to museums and sterile wildlife parks and historic buildings. The family activities have been rather tame. But I am having fun with them just the same."

and I'm hovering around xmas on the flist, oy -- I'll catch up before I leave for Oz on thursday, I promise...

i . OMG I HAVE A TICKET TO SYDNEY!!! I am freaking out both from squeeeee and from having irrevocably committed to this crazy thing.

Itinerary
saturday 1/07 :: arrive Melbourne, 09:25 ~ hi giantessmess!
fly to Sydney on tuesday 1/10 or so ~ hi my lovelies!
wednesday 1/18 :: leave Sydney, 15:20
wednesday 1/18 :: arrive LA, 09:45 (neat how I get to go backwards in time)
which gives me till friday morning, probably, with Sab. but still a proper week in Sydney -- which I hope will turn out to be a good compromise (I couldn't bring myself to pass through LA without at least a little visit).

still have to book the NY-LA and Melbourne-Sydney tix, which I'll do tomorrow. but credit card numbers have been given and there's no turning back now! I'm flying Quantas.

I really would like to organize some sort of girlslash fandom convergence while I'm in sydney. aleatory_6? there are a few peeps who aren't even on my flist who I should give a shout-out to...

let me also say that I have no expectations beyond quality time with quality people. I'm low maintenance and don't have any particular ambitions of tourism. though I wouldn't mind being shown around your lives.

ii. yesterday my advisor and I laid out The Plan for the Rest of My Life, as follows:

NOW-februay 2006 :: develop course (description due)
spring-summer 2006 :: develop field lists, study for exams
:: continue work on course proposal/syllabus/CV
summer 2006 :: write field essay
fall 2006 :: take exams (while TAing) :: Sheridan Center certification
spring 2007 :: teach course :: Pembroke seminar
summer 2007 :: diss proposal
2007-2008 :: diss (while TAing) :: (and probably the advanced Sheridan certification, now that I look at it)
2008-2009 :: finish diss (while on fellowship, hopefully -- and if so I may move back to nyc completely)

because this is the crazy way my mind works, the first item of business is creating the technological infrastructure for all of this. I'm going to actually start using cyborganize as my project blog -- so this is a good time to friend her if you're interested in following my academic work. then I have to do a bunch of painful software updating of her sister site so that the LJ can be mirrored there (like this journal + http://projectjulie.net). then, I'm going to attempt to configure/customize CiviCRM to work as an online database for sources for my exams/course/diss. because why do all that work if I'm not going to share?

next semester is going to be a bit crazy, considering that in addition to the independent work I'll be carrying almost a full courseload:
• MC0120 S02 - Cinema and Stardom: Image/Industry/Fantasy ~ T./Th. 1:00- 2:20 PM + M. 7:00-11:00 PM // Lynne Joyrich [me = TA]
• MC0170 S07 - Open Source Culture: Art, Technology, Intellectual Property ~ W. 3:00- 7:00 PM + T. 8:00-10:00 PM // Mark Tribe
• MC0210 S02 - Criticism and Culture in Marxist Theory ~ F. 2:00- 4:20 PM // Phil Rosen [audit]

iii. [the following was written on sunday night:] I'm trying to watch tonight's LIVE West Wing on tape. it's AMAZING but also both boring and very uncomfortable, much like a "real" debate. I keep having to stop it because I can't deal. I'm obsessed with gathering press about it, though, so someday I can teach it. TWoP has a thread, as does coffeejunkii here, and I posted one in cj_fangrrl here (also, there's CJ/Ellen comment pr0n by me there heeee!).

I've been sticking around and hermit-ing lately to leave time for me to do a string of homework. thus far it's proceeding apace. nice not to have to be stressed out (yet). so now that I'm up-to-date on other things I've been catching up on TV hardcore in preparation for the Bad Girls marathon that's slated for after my lecture on monday. so you get another update:

( this is becoming ridiculous )

you may now feel free to lobby me to watch other favorite shows of yours. while I cannot accept gifts of commercial goods or services or direct monetary contributions, slipping some girlslash to me under the table has been known to sway my opinion.

iv. OMG OTP!!!
Ironically, while Deleuze is arguably Foucault's greatest champion, it is he who ultimately renders the anti-anthropological Foucault impotent, and, in a way, begins the process of dating Foucault.
~ Alex Galloway, Protocol (86)
get it... DATING Foucault! (but through impotence?) bring on teh Paris68 slash...

and, I know that marveling at spam is like so 2003, but sometimes I read it and it's just SO INSANE (machine language, indeed).

From: "Patsy Galvan" <heinrichygtg@breitmar.de>
Date: Tue, 8 Nov 2005 15:08:06 -0500
Subject: Windows

[a link which I almost did click but I resisted]
Tattood Nude Gay Gets Blowjob & Fucking On SofaYoung Hitch Hiker Gay Oral & Anus Fuck

A friend is someone who doesn't like the same people you do.To betray you must first belong.Praise those of your critics for whom nothing is up to standard.
Christ's grave was the birthplace of an indestructible belief that death is vanquished and there is life eternal.The function of muscle is to pull and not to push, except in the case of the genitals and the tongue.Short judgments make long friends.
Faith certainly tells us what the senses do not, but not the contrary of what they see it is above, not against them.There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.
Every once in a while someone without a single bad habit gets caught.
Go oft to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path.

v. this cool photographer Lizzy Kalisvaart was covering the netporn conference, and she graciously sent along some pictures she took of me. the ONLY pictures of me in Amsterdam. [for personal use only]

this is me on my panel, trying to look all hipster-professional. it's either before or after my talk, since the compy is closed.

then she did a mini photo shoot with each of the presenters in the Albert Cuyp street market next door. each person in a different crazy booth -- mine was a fabric store.

bonus meme. to prove how much I love you!
You have a total of 103 friends
You requested to guess 20 entries.
2 were skipped due to invalid content (surprising?).
You made 18 guesses.
You got 15 correct.
Doing the math for you, that means you got 83% correct
this may not sound like much, but a couple were really short and random, like "friends only: comment to be added" and "17 HS icons." I NEVER skim!! many of them I knew instantly without even having to look at the multiple choice options. I'm not a popularity whore, I swear!
eta: mkay, I was worried you wouldn't believe me, so I did it again:
You made 19 guesses.
You got 18 correct.
Doing the math for you, that means you got 94% correct
luck seems to play a role. those shortshort entries are hard!

• just for the record, I'm not buying that the underscore is the new bullet as per iamsab. I love my bullets! they are so satisfyingly round and centered. this is to say that yes, here we have yet another post full of randomness. you know you love it. (it's a bitch to tag, though.)

• and to put fannishness first -- a big wet HAPPY BIRTHDAY to sinful_caesar. I was a bad friend and didn't send her anything. what she has sent me is an appreciation for the glorious slashiness that is Wicked, the musical. truly the mind bloggles. a case in point: For Good, the final love ballad between Glinda and Elphaba (the Wicked Witch), which you may also see in moving pictures in this video, which features Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoworth rehearsing it.

I'm feeling the urge to drabble Elphaba/Dorothy (among various pending femslash100 projects) -- partially as a result of the hotness of their whole enemies dynamic in the original film, which I just saw some stills from. I worry the Gelphie fandom will hate me forever.

• also, before getting started, let me just acknowledge that the weather has been stunning. october and still gloriously sunny and in the 70's. these sorts of aberrations always feel apocalyptic to me, like the friendly face of catastrophic climate change a la The Day After Tomorrow. or, on a less epic scale, I'm anticipating getting slammed by a horror of a winter, just when we least expect it, lulled as we are into complacency by Indian summer. the weather in Amsterdam was lovely too (especially considering it was forecasted to rain all weekend), but closer to 60. just warm enough that I could sit on a bench in the Vondelpark with my laptop, revising my paper. not quite warm enough that I wanted to sit and eat outside at sidewalk cafes, though the locals seemed to be game.

( Amsterdam )

• when I wasn't at the conference or at a museum or foraging for food or reading for school, I was at the hostel catching up on LJ (free wireless is love!). I don't know why I always end up commenting in a mad obsessive spree, but apparently it works for me. so I'm nearly there* and yet again resolving not to get behind any more no sir. haha. I should really cut back, but I don't wanna. girls_today is sorely tempting me to start reading in HP again, but I shall be strong. it did, however, bring to my attention to a totally mind-blowing Umbridge/Hermione fic (yes, you read that right) by yamapea. I really do *heart* wrongness, because this is like my dream pairing. it's disturbing, explicit, and it absolutely works.

• the point being, overall, that this trip was everything I'd hoped.

• lately, I've been particularly enamored of the words evanescence, effervescence, efflorescence.

• I wrote this all very quickly and stayed up too late in order to do so. but you know, if I don't blog it that means it DIDN'T HAPPEN. ergo, more soon...

* does not include comments from March 1, 2005-June 21, 2005, which have been set aside as a project for some even more absurdly remote date.

phoneposting seems to be malfunctioning -- wtf? so here, manually, is a picture of Amsterdam, just to prove I was there. it's the only one I took! I liberated myself from photography. houseboats, which I'm obsessed with (and 18th century townhouses, which unfortunately don't have the distinctive bell-shaped gables of the 17th century ones). anyway, I'm back! twas a lovely trip, perfectly balanced. film @ 11.

New York, Venice, Stockholm, Istanbul -- there's nothing I love more than a city veined by the sea. Amsterdam, with its rings of circulatory canals, has been waiting for me. arriving at an outer platform of central station, whose panoramic window looks out on a wide waterway glowing with early morning sun, it's hard not to be smitten.

but EU customs, you know, for some reason their stamps are almost illegibly faint. so during my europe trip this summer I outlined all of them on my passport, for my own reference, trying to identify the country and date. now, since then, I've been through probably greek and certainly turkish, US, and canadian customs, and nobody has hassled me. but here they sternly threatened me with arrest (I didn't think for a moment it would come to this, but still), pulled me aside into the immigration police office (I was the only white person there) and let me cool my heels for half an hour whereupon they let me go on my merry way after another scolding. don't write in your passports, kids -- I may have to get a new one in order to avoid such problems in the future. needless to say, this initial experience did little to endear me to the Dutch.

in its favor, however, Schipol airport features a train station, just past baggage claim. not just a commuter link with the city center, but an actual train station, with connections to a country-wide network. it's brilliant, and nothing warms the cockles of my heart like good public transportation. and it's really true -- there are an *insane* amount of bicyclists here. to top it off, I saw a rainbow through the train window, faint and fleeting amid the tatters of clearing fall rainclouds.

I'm in the lounge of the hostel, where there's indeed free wireless (paradise!), ensconsed here for the day to revise my conference paper (eep!) and prepare for section, which I'm teaching tonight at the Small Grassy Island (#92170) in LambdaMOO (hee!). tourism will come later -- though I suppose I'll have to venture out for food at some point today. and ah, the second-hand pot smoke begins o_O

livejournal is rather a conundrum. I'm caught up (post-DO) on flist reading, but far behind on comments/feedback (yet again). the semester is only going to get busier, and at some point I may have to make some structural change in my engagement here, though I can't envision what that would look like *clings*. to make matters worse, I have a habit of opening up all sorts of fic and posts in tabbed windows to save for later, and then periodically Safari crashes and I lose this crucial to-do list (as happened this morning -- in fact the computer entirely froze up and then turned itself off, which in my memory has never happened to me before). so then I have to go through my entire browser history to try to reconstruct it, which takes like an hour. and I'm never satisfied that there wasn't something I missed, something vital which will now be lost to me forever.

the past period been exhilarating but even more exhausting, and what I want most out of this trip is to feel caught up and renewed at the end of it. correspondence can eat up infinite amounts of time, and I don't know how to nurture my connections to the burgeoning number of people I love, or how not to.

*

clyde_man's family post-Rita update: people who live in Lake Charles (this would be clyde's mom and hir sister-in-law's whole family) have been told they may not be able to come home until november. ack! but the military "menfolk" who returned to the city report that there's only minor wind damage to mom's house, and no flooding. clyde's brother in Beaumont didn't fare so well -- a tree fell on his house and crushed part of it. brother in Houston is fine, but for the fact that all the Lake Charles folks are staying with them. other brother they haven't heard from but he lives further inland so probably everything is fine. clyde_man is griping that the preponderance of the aid is going to Texas, while so much of the Louisiana coast is completely decimated and not getting any attention. also note that Allstate is refusing to pay claims on flood insurance in New Orleans, because the flooding was caused by a failure of the levies and not by a natural disaster -- wow, how much do we love them?

*

I didn't watch the Emmys. I was on my way home from DO, and anyway I can't be bothered to schedule my life around dreck like that. but the other night I had a dream that heathers insisted that I needed to watch them, and lonejaguar generously provided me with vids. and then of course watching the vids morphed into me being AT the Emmys. I witnessed a playful interaction between Mariska and Allison Janney (my random RFPS OTP). then later I overheard Mariska saying she'd redesigned her horrifying web site, and I muttered "thank god" under my breath, not so quietly that she wouldn't notice. but I felt guilty and apologized to her afterwards. haha.

*

remember how I said I want to be on a reality dating show? I don't think I spend enough time in nyc to actually apply, but yay!

( gay TV casting call )

*

the memeosphere tells me when you see this, post some Shakespeare in your journal (or something along those lines), so I bring you teh girlslash:

Celia entreating her father to spare Rosalind, As You Like It I.iii

I was too young that time to value her;
But now I know her: if she be a traitor,
Why so am I; we still have slept together,
Rose at an instant, learn'd, play'd, eat together,
And wheresoever we went, like Juno's swans,
Still we went coupled and inseparable...
I cannot live out of her company.

I meant to write a slashtastic drabble after I saw the play this summer, but the actress who played Rosalind was wholly uninspiring, ugh.

and your academic quote -- this time about LJ! a parody entitled "The Buribunks: A Historico-Philosophical Meditation," written by one Carl Schmitt in 1918, is included almost in its entirety in Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (231-242). excerpts:

( every Buribunk, regardless of sex, is obligated to keep a diary on every second of his or her life )

and no, nobody has any idea where the term Buribunk comes from.

it was supposed to rain all weekend (hurricane Ophelia hit the Atlantic coast last thursday). instead, it was absurdly sunny and gorgeous and warm (with cooler nights).

this is to say (if the allegory is too subtle) that Dark Odyssey is a magical place.

there's a temptation to say something gushingly utopian about it, but it's not a space I want to idealize. issues of race and class and gender oppression don't disappear with sexual openness, and they're present at DO in palpable ways. along with the more mundane dose of clueless straight men (no offense) and bad boundaries and (more passively) people whose kinks and practices I don't particularly relate to -- the usual challenges of a pansexual (vs. a queer) environment. nonetheless, I was very conscious of how DO, as a community, is able to set aside in one fell swoop a crushing weight of disciplinarity that circumscribes our bodies and subjectivities under patriarchy. I know that sounds polemical, but I absolutely mean it. the honesty, generosity, validation that appear when you take away socially regulated ideas of what is public and private, what bodies are supposed to look like and do and feel, is profound. I had many moments last weekend where someone would say /do something that's completely nonsensical or inappropriate by RL standards, and I'd laugh and think "only at Dark Odyssey!" I mean, it's a life that looks absolutely bizarre from the outside -- except that I feel powerfully and instinctively that it's RL that's bizarre in comparison, that DO is the way the world *should* be. I know that most people (even most of the enlightened ones) aren't ready to be exposed to this sort of immersion, because it is intense and alien -- but it still makes me sad that *everyone* doesn't get to have this experience.

I am wildly inspired on every level of my being. I really reconnected with the fact that my alternative sexuality is the core of both my political and intellectual work, was reminded that in this very media-focused department it's easy to get drawn away from that (it's unfortunate I don't have an advisor who's a hard core queer theorist -- but one can't have *everything* in a grad program). so I'm recommitted to finding a coherent way to link online fandom (my presumed diss topic) to the broader questions of sexual politics in a mediated culture. this is not as distant as it may sound -- a lot of the issues I'm interested in are particular to the internet's reconfiguration of public/private and to sexuality as a basis for community and action, neither of which is foreign to fandom. but in my undergrad thesis I relied on a naive optimism about fandom as a political practice, so I'm going to have to find a more complex and extended route through this nexus. I even came up with a netart project I want to do with wetheaudience.org yesterday -- but I was sleep deprived and it may be stupid, so it's sekrit until I get a chance to think it through. just, DO made me feel like a superheroine, like I'm brilliant and beautiful and absolutely invincible. I'm behind now and have way too much on my plate, but instead of being stressed I'm energized and determined and have so much to SAY.

and also wonderful people, old and new. the best way I've come up with to describe DO is that it's a family reunion -- for my leather family! and I met butterflywing...

*

in non-DO news, cabenson wins the PRIZE of her choice (I'm assuming this will involve naked ladies) because she generously sent me the S.1 DVDs of Bad Girls! thanks CB -- I can't wait to watch them!! and I've promised to get them on bittorrent sometime soon (as soon as I work out my own ongoing DVD-burning problems).

also, I was emailed a new mindmap for some reason -- and I'm all encircled by my SVU girls! is it based on comment volume or amount of mutual friends, I wonder?

( mindmap )