Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup -- Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup
MY BROTHER IS NOW A DOCTOR OF BIOCHEMICAL PHILOSOPHY! HE VILL RULE ZE VORLD! GO DOWNLOAD HIS PROGRAM! WOOOOOO!
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04:04:53 PM,Saturday 16 April 2005
Going down to Hunter to hear a lecture on Tiberius and watch my girl receive her rightful accolades for being the Classics Stud of the Century.
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01:46:54 PM,Friday 15 April 2005
I'm about halfway through The Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Jan Potocki, and I freakin' love it. It's set in Spain, and was written in French by a Pole who wound up shooting himself in the head with a bullet fashioned from the silver knob of his sugar bowl. It's entirely bizarre and random and glorious. Some excerpts:
"Then I felt one of the hanged men seize my left ankle. I tried to shake myself free but the other one cut off my escape. He loomed up in front of me, staring at me with terrible eyes and poking out his tongue, which was as red as iron straight from the furnace. I pleaded for mercy but in vain. With one hand he grasped me by the throat, and with the other he tore out my eye, the one that I am now missing. He darted his burning tongue into my eye-socket and licked my brains, which made me bellow with pain. Then the other one, who had grasped my left leg, decided to use his claws. First he tickled the sole of the foot he was holding, then that monster tore off my skin, separated out all the sinews, laid them bare and tried to play a tune on them as though on a musical instrument. But as my sinews did not give out a sound which pleased him, he stuck his claws into my calf, pinched the tendons and began to twist them round as one does in order to tune a harp. Eventually he began to play on my leg, which he had turned into a sort of psaltery."
"I was unable to resist her gentle entreaties, but in trying to climb down on the stove I felt my foot touch the rim of the jar; I tried to hold on to where I was but sensed that I would bring down the cupboard with me, so I let go with my hands and fell into the jar of ink. I would have drowned in it had not my aunt grabbed the pestle which was used to stir the ink and hit the jar very hard with it. It broke into a thousand pieces. At that moment my father came in. He saw a river of ink flooding his room and a black figure filling it with appalling shrieks. He rushed down the staircase, twisted his foot and fell down in a faint."
"'Why four beds?' I asked the lady.
'So that one can move from one to the next during night shen one is hot and cannot sleep,' she replied.
'And why are the beds so large?' I continued.
'That is because the princess is joined in them by her ladies-in-waiting whenever she feels like chatting before she goes to sleep. But let us pass on to the bathroom.'"
"Take the case of Antony in Egypt. He is prey to two emotions: ambition, which incites him to rule, and love, which dissuades him from it. I represent these two movements by two lines, AB and AC, with an arbitrary angle between them. The line AB, representing the love of Antony for Cleopatra, is less than AC because at heart Antony has less love than ambition. Let us suppose he has three times less. So I take the line AB and produce it to three times the length of AC. Now I complete the parallelogram and draw in the resulting diagonal, which represents exactly the new direction produced by Antony's attraction to B and C. This diagonal will come closer to the line AB the greater we suppose love is. And contrarily it will come closer to the line AC the more ambition is supposed. Augustus, for example, who did not experience love, was not deflected from point C. And although less energetic he reached it more quickly."
The idiot westie broke into the back room and chewed up:
* The right foam piece on my new earphones. He'd already gotten the left one last week (I've been having to make do with a cut-up sock and a paperclip), but he didn't do any damage to this one, fortunately, so I was able to put it back on.
* A piece of wood from a clothes hanger, though at least he didn't swallow the nails.
* A Goddamn Brillo Pad
Seriously, what the holy glaaah?! I called Poison Control, which told me to call Animal Posion Control, which charged my employers fifty bucks and then told me to give him four slices of bread and mix a quarter can of unspiced pumpkin in with his next four meals. He seems just fine; not a single observed ill effect, except for a telltale detergent pinkness about the paws and a night of fishy flatulence (acres of fun, let me tell you). Stupid dog.
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10:20:40 AM,Friday 15 April 2005
I... slept. Like, in a bed. For nine blissful uninterrupted hours. And goddamn do I feel good.
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08:46:04 PM,Wednesday 13 April 2005
Hm. If, for the purposes of my application, (since they made such a huge stink about Only-English-Majors-Need-Apply and all) Hunter decides to consider my Literature classes separately from the rest of my record, I might not come out looking all that shabby. My overall SJC GPA (135 credits) is 3.4, but those 15.5 credits (six A minuses, five As, and a B plus) average out to a 3.8. And if I do well in this class I'm taking now (which'll depend on the paper, I'm figuring), I may even get to bump that up a little, to the tune of three extra credits. So hey.
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03:09:06 PM,Tuesday 12 April 2005
Bah. Screw this whole sleeping bullcocky. It never works. I just wind up lying in bed all morning doing nothing and feeling lousy. Plus I had 220 mg of caffeine last night, so I dunno why I even thought I should try in the first place. I'm just gonna make a blogswap instead and have one less thing to worry about before Croquet.
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12:11:29 PM,Tuesday 12 April 2005
THE ONLY EMPEROR IS THE EMPEROR OF ICE CREAM.
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08:59:15 AM,Tuesday 12 April 2005
Today a lady walked past our park bench talking in some Slavic language. I thought maybe Russian, but wasn't sure. K. thought Polish. I'm inclined to trust the New Yorker over the Rube. But are there any simple tricks to distinguish between the two, aurally?
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09:41:47 PM,Sunday 10 April 2005
Independent confirmation! She ninja-dances!
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09:29:08 PM,Sunday 10 April 2005
Another glorious weekend.
* Trip to The Cloisters for a picnic and a lecture on Disease in Medieval Art that wound up being so lame we ditched it two minutes in and just wandered around on our own. Sightings: A nun, a monk, K.'s old apartment, Dyer's Greenweed, a narwhale horn, and three apes building a trestle table.
* Dinner with her assembled fambly, all joviality. More baths and books and songs and sleep and beasts.
* Another bloody picnic this morning. But, damnit, it's spring! And it ruled.
* Practiced my violin for the first time in ages. Got an audition next Sunday for a Klezmer/Gypsy/Tango band. Pretty sure I'm nowhere in their league, but who knows? It's good to feel the old ache in my fingers again.
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08:49:44 PM,Sunday 10 April 2005
Hot Jazz! Hot Girls! Hot Homeric Hymns!
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03:53:55 PM,Friday 8 April 2005
Heeee! Y'all should see the haircut I just got. I look like a marshmallow that got caught in a particle accelerator. I think it'll come out fine after a shower and some combing, but oh lordy. My fault for not knowing how to say, "Just make me look like a 1920's matinee idol" in Spanish, I guess.
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03:05:12 PM,Thursday 7 April 2005
My brother totally turned in his PhD dissertation on Tuesday. Just how much unbearable ass does that kick?
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11:11:53 AM,Thursday 7 April 2005
(ganked from Cassie)
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09:06:41 PM,Wednesday 6 April 2005
Waste.
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04:17:15 PM,Tuesday 5 April 2005
Man, I was thinking that the last several bleary Sundays were so hard because I felt so guilty about slacking every weekend, but I think it's got more to do with the whole staying-up-for-24-hours thing, 'cause I don't feel the slightest bit guilty right now, and I'm still wiped out.
Things is grand, though. Well, then. The news, now that the girl's blogged it: she got a scholarship to work with her favorite professor (whose glasses I covet unbearably) on a Bronze Age Minoan dig in Paros this summer from June 20 to July 20!!! Blows my everlovin' mind, that girl. Boy, does she deserve it, and boy howdy, will she rock it. So yeehaw!
To celebrate her victory and my end to grad angst (at least 'til the letter comes in) and the grueling week we both had preceding 'em, we:
* Ate olive and mushroom pizza for dinner, breakfast, and second breakfast, respectively
* Bought books (she got Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver and bought me King Lear in a Box, which comes complete with retractable dagger, fool's cap, squishy eyeballs, and scripts for an ultracondensed 45-minute performance version of the play), and I got Peter S. Beagle's The Rhinocerous Who Quoted Nietzsche and Jan Potocki's The Manuscript Found in Saragossa). I'm also still in the middle of Foucault's Pendulum, after a torturous hiatus, and am so damn happy to be able to pick it up again.
* Bought smelly bath depth charges and face goops and soaps and things.
* Read read read in bath and bed. Palgolak was well pleased.
* Rented Don Giovanni but wound up watching The Royal Tenenbaums with her ma instead. Maybe see it tomorrow, if all signs point to yes.
* Had diner breakfast with her dad. (Smoked turkey eggs benedict. Hardcore good.)
* Went to Williamsburg (first time off the island since August! Go me!) with R. and other K. to attend the former's reading of her story from the new Cthulhusex anthology. Had Thai food (basil roast duck that was so insanely good I almost wept at not being able to finish it 'cause I was still too full of turkey benedict), played with little chocolate egg toy thingies magnanimously distributed by the authoress -- I got a maniacal monocled evil genius mole named Panjandrum and a spazzy spectacled cormorant who liked They Might Be Giants -- and tried SO DESPERATELY not to explode in paroxysms of snickers at the other readers when they came out with lines like "her gossamer wings of darkness sought to penetrate my waiting mind". But R.'s story kicked so much ass it utterly redeemed the evening. And when I went home, there was totally a guy playing "Libiamo" on his accordion down in the subway. I gave him a grin and a dollar.
Now I'm just waiting out the night. A bit of a bummer: my computer's power supply is fuznukkited. I have to ram the thing in there and pull with all my might on the cord and then wrap it around the keyboard three times or else it won't charge. I'm fairly sure it's the socket and not the power supply itself, which sucks, but whatever the case I'll be bringing the beast in sometime this week, so don't look for any more late night missives for a while. Bleh. Oh well.
I'm happy.
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03:27:01 AM,Monday 4 April 2005
Damn. I want the Miskatonic University scent so bad, but I'm almost frikkin' positive the Irish Coffee would make it go sickly sweet on me. Grr.
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10:50:29 PM,Sunday 3 April 2005
Thing turned in, full night's sleep, cold pizza for breakfast, small orange cat-shaped walrus at my knee, girl singing Weill, about to go out and buy China Mieville and rent Jeeves & Wooster...
