Julia's Bloglet

Birds are singing outside.It's simultaneously nice and strange. Nice because they make pretty twittering sound and it means the weather is really planning to stay warm (though it isn't miserably hot yet, thankfully). Strange because it's four o'clock in the morning and the sky is pitch black. _
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09:53:29 PM, Tuesday 11 March 2003

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I can see how I'm really not meant to sleep this week. _
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09:28:35 PM, Tuesday 11 March 2003

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In a burst of power, she will magically finish the Folklore workbook within the next thirty minutes!
(also: Fuck! How'd it get to be 20:30 already?) _
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02:23:28 PM, Tuesday 11 March 2003

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Nothing says Peter Pan like Bolero. _
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01:03:49 PM, Tuesday 11 March 2003

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Blue jeans were called waist-overalls until about 1960. The Levi Strauss company considers the birthday of blue jeans to be May 20, 1873. A hundred and five years and eight days before mine. Does anyone else think it's sort of creepy that jeans have a "birthday"? _
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11:33:48 AM, Tuesday 11 March 2003

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A race, which I have officially lost. But hey, Zora Neale Hurston! Sometimes work is fun. _
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09:26:00 AM, Tuesday 11 March 2003

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Langue anglaise écrite done! Now can I do the Folklore one in less than half an hour? It's a race against time! _
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08:54:46 AM, Tuesday 11 March 2003

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I can finish the workbooks by Three thirty.

I can Finish the workbooks by three thirty.

I can finish the workbooks by three thirty.

There, that's three times. That makes it truth, right? _
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07:18:08 AM, Tuesday 11 March 2003

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The trees, they blossom! _
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06:01:48 AM, Tuesday 11 March 2003

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I bought a little pouch from a homeless woman today. She was sitting on the sidewalk in ront of Hall du Livre, knitting. She seemed happy there next to her dog. All the homeless people have dogs because there's a law that they can't be arrested for loitering if they have dogs. France loves dogs, see? So if the homeless people were arrested, their dogs would have no place to go and no once to take care of them. Never mind that the people have nowhere to go and no one to take care of them, which seems to be the problem in the first place, doesn't it? But yes, the woman seemed happy and the pouches were pretty and I like that she was actually trying to do something other than be offensive like this kind of person. She smiled when I talked to her. It seemed genuine. I liked that part of the day much better than the part where the bug flew into my eye. _
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05:31:40 PM, Monday 10 March 2003

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There is nothing worse than a gay, Communist pool man. Nothing. _
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01:27:53 PM, Monday 10 March 2003

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What is wrong with me? I so cannot focus on work. Not at all. But ask me to consider the dangers of Objectivism and Mysticism at length, and I'm all down with that. Why? _
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07:52:01 AM, Monday 10 March 2003

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I've come into work all early-like. Thinking I was okay. That I could get everything done on time. Only to find an e-mail from the boss telling everyone that the exam, which we had all previously thought to be due on the 15th was apparently supposedly due last Monday and MUST be turned in today AT THE LATEST on pain of death, or at least severe injuries. Grrr Argh. Have I mentioned yet how much I really can't wait to get a low wage, low responsibility job? _
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01:34:26 AM, Monday 10 March 2003

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The moon looks like a glowing cat's claw. I dreamt a joke last night that made me laugh so hard I woke, but when I tried to reconstruct it the amusing factor had vanished. I tried to explain it to Moss, but all that came out was a garbled mix of Pilgrims, and gay boys in worsted wool hot pants. I want to be a giant bi-plane, trailing lavender silk scarves. _
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01:58:59 PM, Sunday 9 March 2003

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There are no movies playing that I actually want to see. Grar. _
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02:18:34 PM, Friday 7 March 2003

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Uh yeah, Moss: I'd prefer it if you had ripped abs and bulgin biceps. Also, I'm sick of hanging out with your beer guzzling friends and I hate your mother. Can our relationship be saved? _
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04:06:31 PM, Thursday 6 March 2003

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Super Sour Gummy French Fry Man! _
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03:19:00 PM, Thursday 6 March 2003

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Sometimes, looking for cartoons to put in the correspondence course workbooks is really fucking depressing. _
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02:34:00 PM, Thursday 6 March 2003

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This makes me very wary. I mean, I'm all for the SAG's official stance, but not so happy that it had to be a question at all. In some ways I guess I'd like to think society has evolved a lot more than it really has.

Also, it occurs to me that as a very small child, I had the vague idea that being a Communist meant that you killed people and didn't give them food. I expect that 4 year old me would be rather shocked to hear that 24 year old me comes out dangerously close to Communist on the Political Compass test. I'm not sure I can really be considered Communist. Perhaps Socialist is more like it, but either way, McCarthyists wouldn't really like me much.

Perhaps strangest of all is the thought that my great grandfather was Secretary of the Navy for three years in the fifties. A staunch Republican, to be sure, and friends with Eisenhower. To be fair, Dwight did sort of have a part in ousting Joe from the senate, but I don't think we could call him a Communist sympathizer.

My great grandfather (who was my mother's mother's father) died when I was five. I don't remember much of him, except that he collected elephants (not real ones), loved to laugh, and that I always had to kiss his cheek when I saw him and secretly hated it because he felt and smelled old. I was very guilty when he died, because I knew that not liking kissing him wasn't very nice of me, and now he was dead. It wasn't until I was fifteen and my great grandmother died that I realized they must have been very interesting people. She'd gone senile right after he died, but in her day had been a sparkling hostess and Los Angeles Times Woman of the Year at least once (1956 or 1957?), and together they'd travelled all over the world doing Diplomatic Things. I remember what actually made me realize it was seeing a photograph of them taken in 1945 with Chiang Kai Shek. I'd just studied Chiang Kai Shek in 10th grade world history class, and suddenly there were my great granparents in front of his house, where they'd apparently eaten dinner. Somehow this impressed me in a way that knowing they knew the Eisenhowers hadn't. As if it said, "Look, they socialized with people who are in your WORLD history books!"

I realize now that I have no idea what their political views really were, but a) I doubt we'd match much and b) I really wish I could talk to them and find out.

My grandfather (my mother's father) and I don't talk politics, but that's because he's very loud about his viewpoints, which generally add up to, "Kill all the un-American bastards!" And as he's 84 and set in his ways and not likely to change anything on his own anyway (he doesn't belong to any political groups, has no friends in crucial places, etc.), I tend to let it rest. But I don't know that my great grandfather was as cantankerous as my grandfather. He seems not to have been, based on my hazy memories and the scattered stories family members have told me. My grandfather has quite a temper, and is the sort of person who has no qualms biting a waiter's head off if he makes a mistake or service is slow. Occasionally Madre lets herself be baited by his hyperconservative claims and tries to argue, but it only serves to enrage them both. Indeed, I've actually found myself saying such things as, "Mother, sometimes innocent people have to be killed to preserve justice," in order to smooth things out. Sometimes it takes her a minute or two to catch on that I obviously don't actually really think this, but in the end she gets the hint and lays off the flagrant liberalism in front of G-pops.

Long story short, I'm sure G-pops would vehemently disapprove of my anti-war stance, but I don't honestly know what my great grandfather would think, and I'd actually like to find out.

Gee, this post has rambled a long way from the one line it was intended to be. _
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10:18:24 AM, Thursday 6 March 2003

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Another museum dream last night. Though I couldn't remember the details of it when I woke up, except that at some point I was given three unique antique lamps, all of which incorporated a very shocking pink color into their designs. I was going to have trouble finding lightbulbs for them because two were from Africa and one was from England. Another odd detail, Moss was in the dream and had siblings (a brother and a sister) and also beat someone up. He was afraid his mother would be upset about the beating up thing.

3 museum dreams in one week. What would Freud make of this? _
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07:31:34 AM, Thursday 6 March 2003

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Okay three things:
1. I would really appreciate a pair of headphones that would work for longer than a couple of weeks.
2. I'm also kind of torn as to whether I should be creeped out, annoyed, or actually kind of pleased that the third floor of my building, the one on which I live, has a horror movie-like tendency to not have any working lights. To the extent that if they place a new bulb in one of the lamps, it's certain to be out the next day. And so I usually arrive to blackness, where any manner of evil might lurk. When I am not too freaked out by it (hi, imagination, thatnks for giving me the idea that there may be wringwraiths in the hall. I'm sure there aren't... really... dammit, where's the keyhole?!), it seem kind of cool.
3. I dreamt of my father for the first time in quite a while. My sister's boyfriend's father was also there (though I've never seen him as he died before we ever knew Nicolas, somehow I knew it was him). My sister and I were on a plane, which crash landed on some railroad tracks. Though I'm not afraid of flying, this alarmd me and I half screamed. Sort of a small, 'Ah!' Then my sister and I were milling about the exit with a lot of other aimless travellers and we saw My father and Nicolas's father. My sister laughed at me for having been scared. "You were like, 'Ah! Iraq!'" she said. And the fathers were laughing, too, telling us we didn't need to worry, that it wasn't nearly so scary as we though. And I realized that we'd just died in a plane crash. And we went to collect our bags. _
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02:20:42 PM, Wednesday 5 March 2003

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The electric kettle has died. It s a sad sad day at the office. No more coffe. No More tea. No more Pot Noodle. Mourn for the passing of the electric kettle. Mourn, I say! _
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06:21:06 AM, Wednesday 5 March 2003

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PlatonismElbow: Wow...
PlatonismElbow: Avril Lavigne would be so much cooler if she were a vampire bat! _
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01:36:20 AM, Wednesday 5 March 2003

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I don't really like today. And yet, I can't make myself put an end to it. Gar on me. _
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07:42:51 PM, Tuesday 4 March 2003

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Scanners! Oh wow, I never knew how much fun they could be! _
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02:56:18 PM, Tuesday 4 March 2003

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Also: It's Mardi Gras!

Lacking a better plan, I bought and consumed sour gummy things. The sort of scary part? They're called Super Frites pour les grands et les petits! Frites being French fries. There's a picture of a superhero on the front. Sour Gummy French Fry Man? _
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11:55:09 AM, Tuesday 4 March 2003

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Incidentally, in Spanish joder means to fuck, not joler as Alex thought. Googling for joder will bring up Spanish language porn sites. Googling for joler... won't. Oh, the glorious uses of internet porn! _
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11:07:51 AM, Tuesday 4 March 2003

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That makes two nights in a row now that I've dreamt of visiting odd museums.

First I was an audience member volunteer in a show at the Musée de Prestidigitation. I was the amazing melting woman. I had to hold a cigarette in my mouth and then they touched it to the four corners of my body and I melted, amazingly. I was wearing a very sparkly blue and silver costume. Glittery, but not tasteless, if you can imagine. Also, I wasn't actually me, but someone else. When I melted I found myself in the back room of the museum where they had an automated wtaer massage table. They said I could lie down on it for twenty minutes while I waited. It was warm and lovely, and once I was in that room, I was wearing jeans and a t-shirt again, not the costume. They wouldn't tell me how they made me appear to melt. Prestidigitators never reveal their secrets after all.

Then last night I was in the Kenneth Patchen/Orson Scott Card/Huguenot museum of air and space. We climbed a vast spiral exhibit full of letters and propellers and nuclear fission engines. In the end we jumped out onto the roof and I wanted to save the museum from other people who wanted to destroy it because Patchen/Card/Huguenot the mastermind of aerodynamics, hadwritten correspond and complicated bombs had apparently committed suicide. And the propellers started propelling and the old letters started swirling about and on down the spiral. It was beautiful and sad.

Also, in the Musée de Prestidigitation dream, we left as the museums were closing, and walked by, but didn't get to go into the Muséé Oceanic (all the Musées were clearly labelled in that one, and the Musée de Prestidigitation was labelled in large silver-white glittery script). I managed to look into the lobby of the Musée Oceanic, though, just in passing, and saw miraculous paintings of the sea. They weren't paintings, though, they were alive. Perhaps that particular set of Musées needs to go into a story at some point. Hrmmm. _
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09:09:56 AM, Tuesday 4 March 2003

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Wait a second. The Ring is only rated PG-13? It's got to be bunches less graphic than The Cell, then. Hmmm, maybe I ought to see it after all... After I already live with Moss, though. _
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01:53:31 PM, Sunday 2 March 2003

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Poetry should taste good-
Like ice cream,
Except warmer. _
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01:53:20 PM, Friday 28 February 2003

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The Ibuprofène I bought a couple of weeks ago is made by a lab named RPG. It's on my desk and I keep wondering just what sort of role-playing game Advil inspired. _
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08:16:31 PM, Wednesday 26 February 2003

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Sent today: eleven postcards. Moira, Kerne/Juli, Remi/Liz, Mike, Neil, Mirabai, Chris, Martin, Anne, Katherine, Cassie. Let the games begin. _
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03:10:48 PM, Wednesday 26 February 2003

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When we got the postcards we decided to write half and half. He'd do half and I'd do half. And then we sat in the café for an hour, not thinking of a single thing to say. Eventually the headache got the best of me and we hobbled to the hotel where I slept for a good fourteen hours. I think he might have been awake for some of that time, but one nver knows. In any case, now he's gone, but the postcards are still here. And blank. The papers I had to grade are graded. I know what I'm doing tonight, and there's not telling just what you'll end up with when I'm done. Well, actually, there is telling. You'll end up with a postcard, of course. Chris and Tim, address? Pretty please? _
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03:01:13 PM, Tuesday 25 February 2003

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Rachel looked for setences containing the word "funky" so her students could see it in context. Among the results, this:

"We persuaded people to think of raisins as warm, funky, and cool, and it worked."

Quality. _
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08:30:25 AM, Tuesday 25 February 2003

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If I am a good girl, and if I finish all of my homework, then perhaps I will read more of the Mediaeval murder mystery Ben sent me for Christmas. And perhaps I will make Chinese Chicken Salad. And perhaps I will write the poem that has een brewing in the middle of my head while I have tried to concentrate on French kids' responses to questions about Bill Gates and Bill Clinton. Yea though I mark a thousand papers, still I always find the same mistakes. Nerds, I tell them, may be unpopular, but they are rarely stupid. And you know what else I'll do whenever I can? Alter Books. I will alter books at all, ta. Perhaps I will make an altered book of poems. Yum. And maybe tomorrow, I will actually catch up on Blogs. Because I can't do anything 'til work is done, no matter how much I want to. _
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12:41:27 PM, Monday 24 February 2003

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"This chick, Marla Singer, didn't have testicular cancer." _
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12:14:39 PM, Monday 24 February 2003

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site & script courtesy of Moss

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