Flapdoodles and Applesauce

Two Shots Of Emo From A Mouth As Loud As A Really Loud Thing

2010-05-14T20:41:00.000-07:00

Back for two seconds, peeps. Just long enough to share an absolutely lovely piece of poetry, composed in the main by my brother and I.

At supper, the family was discussing hackneyed poetry and my brother said that under no circumstances could the line, “The rain hides my tears,” be considered hackneyed, as it expressed too ineffable an emotion. At least that was what he would have said if he hadn’t started laughing in the middle. We then proceeded to compose the following glorious poem, trading line for line:
The rain hides my tears,
The thunderclouds represent my fears,
The moon through the clouds leers,
I am mocked by my peers,
I am the son of a parent who had too many beers,
I am only one of society’s cogs and gears.

At this point in time my sister helpfully inserted:
Alas, I wish I could plug my ears.

This cutting criticism of our innermost feelings and our creativity was intolerable:
Your mocking scorn, it sears,

My brother made a gallant attempt to return to the poem:
My death draws near, it appears,

...but our dad ended it with a climactic final line:
My head is cut off by a giant pair of shears.

We should totally publish in Poetry.

Politeness Wins The Confidence Of Princes (And Me)

2010-01-31T18:58:00.000-08:00

Extra, extra, this just in! There are polite people on the nets!

I am having a discussion in the comments section of my last post, and some people are radically disagreeing with my position, yet everyone is maintaining decorum. There’s been no name-calling, no swearing, no unreasoning flaming... I confess myself amazed! I think a little bit of my faith in humanity has been restored; I’ve never seen a conversation such as the one we are having actually be a conversation before. Usually it’s just people that refuse to listen to each other talking at the air. But we have clearly reasoned arguments on both sides!

I do so love talking with intelligent, polite people.

The Return of the Ape-Man (yet again)

2010-01-30T18:34:00.000-08:00

Hello everyone! It’s the weekend! I love the weekend because I have more time to study without worrying about working. Have I just revealed what an interesting life I lead? Oh well. When I have my degree, I will become a world-famous code-cracker. During the course of my career, I will be hired by the government to work in the intelligence community. In my spare time, I will decode the Voynich manuscript, and using the secrets found within, I will be able to alter the fabric of reality so that superheroes actually exist!

Why has this become my new goal? I was reading a superhero webcomic. This one, in fact. Heroes Inc. It’s written by Scott Austin, an American from Scandinavia who is also part Cherokee who lives in Finland. The Cherokee must have emigrated to Scandinavia (an unspecified country) and then had a kid who emigrated back, got citizenship, didn’t like it, and scooted for Finland, near as I can figure.

Ok, so I don’t get it either. But in any case. The comic is as a whole very well done. Beautiful drawing and colouring (most times), plot on the upper end of webcomics and superhero webcomics especially, Obama is super-whitified… oh, yeah, and this brings me around to something that stuck out at me like a sore thumb. Besides the white Obama. (Compare skin tone, did he even use a different colour for shading the white dudes?)

This guy is working with old-school comic heroes. To keep true to form, there’s bound to be a bit of hangover racist styling in character design. I can ignore bad physics (and chemistry and math and biology), jeans that hug every curve, women that don’t age at all like women really age (or like the men do), muscles showing through clothes that should never be that pliable, and so forth. It’s superheroes.

At the same time, he’s made changes in places. Look at Blue Buck. Blue Buck looks like a white dude. He’s Cherokee. The only thing that indicates his Native American-ness is a blue feather hanging from his helmet. (You can’t be Native American without a feather.) He isn’t one of those firey redskins, say from Disney or something. He is updated for modern sensibilities.

Now, there is a black dude, and a key point here is that he is, as far as I can tell, not a golden age hero. He’s new, invented for this comic. The black dude is called Lawrence, and… I missed if he has another name. I guess his superhero power bit is more an innate part of him than the rest. Or the government just doesn’t care if anyone knows who he is, he can shift for himself, deflecting all the flack that must have come his way at one point.

Lawrence has the very nice superpower of hulking out. There’s another character that fights for the Nazis (the bad guys, fortunately) who has the same power. Here he is.

Ignoring that all the black men I ever saw in comics (and, if you would like to argue that there are some that are not this way, I am sure you are right: but all the popular, visible ones that I know are this way, which tells you something) have some kind of power that revolves about super-improvement to “natural” characteristics—e.g. strength, speed, or connection to animals—Lawrence has bad luck with his superpower. Lawrence has the unenviable capability of turning into a giant monkey. Yes, a monkey. Look. Monkey.

Now, that big white dude seems a bit short on brain-bits, to be fair. But honestly, a giant monkey? Lawrence SMASH! Savagely. Look, people even notice. Him savage. I wonder if it’s because he is a savage? Black people always are less cultured than everyone else!

You can’t even recognise him. He becomes inhuman. Just a great big ape; there are no features on his tiny little head that bear any resemblance to what he used to look like as a human. Doubt me? Here he is, old. (All black men look like Samuel L. Jackson.) Here he is, young. The white dude, on the other hand, is definitely human. Big, but no elongated, knuckle-dragging arms, no pea-sized head, no instinctive savagery.

The question that I wonder is: was Lawrence designed this way on purpose, or was Scott just so used to seeing the entirety of black men in comics this way that it was actually accidental? And which would be sadder?

Bad News And Me

2010-01-25T19:54:00.000-08:00

I received some very bad news today. I did not break my diet and eat to comfort myself, as has happened in the past, and I collected myself so that I appeared normal when teaching, and I have already formulated four plans, ranked in order of desirability, to deal with the problem. I am now carrying on with my life. I am proud of myself.

Also, to my friends (you know who you are) and my sister: I could not have done any of this without you. I am immensely grateful.

The Cake Is A Lie

2009-12-25T16:46:00.000-08:00

I made my brother's birthday cake today (took me only five hours *die*) and I have to say:

This was a triumph! I'm making a note here, HUGE SUCCESS!

It's hard to overstate my satisfaction with how this cake turned out. Anyway, it was great: so delicious and moist!

This was the recipe I used:

one 18.25 ounce package chocolate cake mix
one can prepared coconut pecan frosting
3/4 cup vegetable oil
4 large eggs
one cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
3/4 cup butter or margarine
1 and 2/3 cups granulated sugar
2 cups all purpose flour

Don't forget garnishes such as:

fish shaped crackers
fish shaped candies
fish shaped solid waste
fish shaped dirt
fish shaped ethel benzine
pull n' peel licorice
fish shaped volatile organic compounds
and sediment shaped sediment
candy coated peanut butter pieces; shaped like fish
one cup lemon juice
alpha resins
unsaturated polyester resin
fiberglass surface resins
and volatile malted milk impoundments
9 large egg yolks
12 medium geosynthetic membranes
one cup granulated sugar
an entry called: "How To Kill Someone With Your Bare Hands"
2 cups rhubarb; sliced
2/3 cup granulated rhubarb
1 tablespoon all-purpose rhubarb
1 teaspoon grated orange rhubarb
3 tablespoons rhubarb; on fire
1 large rhubarb
1 cross-bore hole electromagnetic imaging rhubarb
2 tablespoons rhubarb juice
adjustable aluminum head positioner
slaughter electric needle injector
cordless electric needle injector
injector needle driver
injector needle gun
cranial caps

And it contains proven preservatives, deep penetration agents, and gas and odor control chemicals that will deodorize and preserve putrid tissue.

Socks And Sandals; Or, Fashion Smells

2009-10-09T19:55:00.000-07:00

Today, I noticed my Real Analysis professor wearing socks with his sandals.

Le gasp, right? I mean, what a dork! You can totally tell from ten miles away that he's a math professor, because, like, only a completely fashion blind person would ever pull a stunt like that. And they were white socks with black sandals. It just keeps getting worse!

Perhaps it is a sign that I myself am a math dweeb, but my first thought on noticing his white socks was not the amused and condescending-to-math-enthusiasts disapprobation that a non-math-dweeb friend of mine expressed. I thought first, "Wow those are clean!" Then I thought it was very considerate of him to wear them.

Why would I think that, when I risk going blind from the appalling fashion faux pas? Because feet smell. When people walk around in southern California for the better part of a day, their feet sweat and smell even more.

And when fashion-conscious people neglect to wear socks with their sandals, they treat everyone around them to the trendy and chic toe-farts emanating from their voguish footwear.

Yeesh, gross.

Of Such A Malefactress As This

2009-10-08T12:47:00.000-07:00

I’m back, after a year. I’m not sorry. Welcome again, dear reader!

I’m supposed to be blogging about my vacation. A couple months after it happened. But I’m frightfully lazy when it comes to condensing a whole month of my life into words, so I’ll get around to that eventually. In installments, here and there. Yep. That way, I can make people who read my blog just to find out what I said about them at least skim the rest of my stuff. You shall be inundated with the trivia of my life.

This post is to inform everyone of the details of my car accident that I just had. Yes, just, like three hours ago or so. I’m writing this as I wait for the cops to show up, actually, so it was about 40 minutes ago, but I won’t post it until I get home. I’ve made a note to myself to carry a book in my car at all times in the event of this sort of thing ever happening again. CHP is slow, and having nothing to do but sit and think about an accident sucks. Imagine big hairy lion testicles, with your lips firmly clamped around them. That’s what this is like.

Anyway, the accident. It was like this. I was minding my own business, just going along in my own lane, when suddenly a big-rig flopped over right in front of me. Naturally, I braked and attempted to steer to the side so as not to hit it. All my efforts were in vain, however, as the top of the truck came off and thousands of crates of bananas spilled free: the force of the impact shot them free of their skins and they hurtled at my windshield, smashing and obscuring my vision. The skins were sucked under my tires and there was a hilarious slapstick moment while the wheels spun ineffectually on the banana peels. Then I hit the big-rig, my car pinwheeling comically into a pile of fruit as I bounced off.

What? That’s really how it was!

Ok, fine, it wasn’t. I hit a car on an off-ramp from the freeway. Since I rear-ended him, for some reason this makes it my fault. I completely fail to understand this, I must confess. He was in my way. It’s his fault for being there.

I have determined the positive and negative sides of this accident as I wait for CHP. It’s been 45 minutes since I placed the call now, so I’ve had a bit to think.

Positives:
1) This will teach me to be a less arrogant driver (but not less angry).
2) The other driver was not injured.
3) His car did not suffer more than a dent about 3 centimetres wide in the back bumper, and the back bumper moving down about two millimetres. Very inexpensive, considering what it could have been.
4) He was a very nice man about it. Really very gracious, considering that it was my his fault.
5) He was driving a company car on work business. That means, should he change his mind about being injured, worker’s comp will trump private insurance in paying for it. Phew!

Negatives:
1) My insurance rates will go up.
2) My insurance rates will go up.
3) My insurance rates will go up.
4) I no longer have a perfect at-fault-accident-free record.
5) My insurance rates will go up.
6) My car is totalled. I have to explain this one: it’s not actually totalled as in un-drivable. It’s totalled in that the repairs to fix it are more than the car is worth, so my insurance will not pay for the fixups. They’ll pay me the value of the car. Which is not much. Woe is me!
7) My insurance rates will go up.

Ok, so that was as far as I got before CHP finally arrived. I’ve thought more about the accident since them. Yes, I am currently fixated on it. Wouldn’t you be?

The other guy left before the accident report was filed. CHP took too long getting there: get this, they drove past the accident to the next exit, saw no one there, and figured we had left. It was only when I called to find out why the heck it was taking so long that they went “Oops, haha, our bad” and sent an officer to the right place. So the other guy had left by then. Which is great for me, because if he could drive off and didn’t feel injured enough to wait to tell the officer, it’ll be better for me if he changes his mind about being injured later.

You may think I seem paranoid on this point, but I was in an accident where another car ran into me. It was in a garage, at maybe 2 miles an hour, and all that happened was her tire left a streak in the paint of my fender. That person started saying it was me that ran into her and oh how she huuuuuurt. After she had told me she was fine, and the accident was her fault, and it was a ridiculous little accident anyway. 2 miles an hour cannot hurt anyone! That went away without a fuss once my insurance company found out that she was uninsured and unlicensed.

But my sister was in an accident where the guy claimed millions and millions of dollars of injury, and she was at fault in that one. Her lawyers had to hire a private eye to follow the guy forever and prove he was full of poopy before that went away, and he still got a couple hundred grand anyway. (His lawyer cost more than that so he ended up in the hole. This is called karmic revenge, I believe.)

So, I’m very paranoid that people will sue me if I run into them with my car, which is one reason why until today I have never run into anyone with my car. I’ve done it on a bicycle, though. A fun past-time, running over people with my bicycle.

What was my point here? Oh, right. The guy left, so he doesn’t have a good case if he tries to sue. That was my point, yes. And the accident report will back me up on this.

Oh wait! No, it won’t, because the officer didn’t want to take one, when he finally showed up an hour and a half later. I couldn’t force him to write one, so I had to leave without that nice secure feeling that I did my bit to cover my ass. It made me sad.

To finish this post, I will just remark that I am being punished out of proportion to my crime. I have to take California public transportation until the damage to my car is assessed, seeing as how it’s not legal for me to drive at the moment. It’s that headlight dangling by the wheel. But after the assessment, I have the option of either continuing to take public transportation (and sponge rides off dutiful family at 6 in the morning two days of the week since pubtrans hasn’t got any busses that early) or riding around in my car which I can’t afford to fix properly and so will have duct-taped into legality. And here was me thinking there wasn’t anything that could be done to my car to make it look more white trash than it already was.

Under the circumstances, is there anything that could be more humiliating? I might as well stitch a big red A for Accident into all my collars.

I Return (For Now...)

2008-11-03T00:57:00.000-08:00

My last blog post was… a while ago. Many moons. So many, in fact, that I don’t remember how many precisely. As I write these posts offline and I’m too lazy to go and check, I’ll have to settle for inaccuracy. But after all those months, I’m back. And I’m writing about something interesting. I have an original topic to write about. Something no one has ever written about on their blog before. Ever.

I’m writing about the movies I just watched (by which I really mean watched two days ago).

Scintillating, no? No? Aw, man… Eh, well, original or not, it’s what I’m writing about, since I found a logical flaw with my opinion on abortion and my arguments about homosexual marriage aren’t fully concise yet. And neither of those other two topics were really original anyway, were they?

All right, so, I saw The Day After Tomorrow. What a barrel of laughs! First-rate comedy. My little brother told me afterwards it was a disaster movie, but I maintain it’s definitely a comedy.

I mean, there’s these huge tornadoes, monstrous things, touching down in Los Angeles all over the place. And helicopters are still flying?! Between the funnels? Obviously they did it for laughs. It’s the same thing with the reporters calmly filming these giant whirlwinds that are stripping high-rises of their exteriors and killing people around them left and right. We’re supposed to laugh at the absurdity. They even put a little inside joke in there, just for L.A. residents; LAX international airport—without any planes touching down or taking off, and no traffic, even though the tornadoes literally arose out of the blue within minutes.

And there were the wolves. And the fact that one of the main characters was married to a woman trying to impersonate Michael Jackson. And the Little Cancer Patient, the impersonator’s shaven-headed surrogate son who survives the end of the world. (By the way, have we never heard of triage, people? You know, the practice of culling people in a desperate situation, giving aid to those that will actually live before wasting time on walking dead boys? Except, of course, he couldn’t walk. He could lie in his bed like a very endearing but useless lump.) And the fact that the northern hemisphere rather suddenly goes subzero while the southern hemisphere is… untouched? There was simply so much put in the movie that strained credulity that they must have done it on purpose, as some kind of weird humour.

There was also the blatant preaching about global warming… don’t get me wrong, I think that greenhouse gasses are bad and so on. I just think that no one has any idea what will happen from it, and I think that this sort of climate change has happened before (little Ice Age, anyone?), and—you know, I’m going to delay my thoughts on global warming for another blog post lest this one get too long. I’m already at 477 words and counting. But the preaching and the heavy-handed irony—I just had to laugh at it.

At the same time as this was a comedy, however, it was also a tragedy. They. Burned. Books. I have never been as traumatised by a movie before. Ever. It was worse than Hostel. It was worse than Dungeons & Dragons. It was worse than Pirates!

But that’s not what I really had to say on it. I was really going to talk about something I don’t think the writers thought about when they wrote their script. Near the end of the movie, only the southernmost parts of the southern states are not covered in ice. The surviving Americans have crossed the Rio Grande and are refugees in Mexico. They would be illegal immigrants except that Mexico allowed them access after the President agreed to forgive all Latin American debt. I thought that was quite generous of the Mexican President to bargain like that on behalf of all of Latin America but at the same time I think he was quite stupid—he should have held out for more, what with the annihilation of all Americans as his bargaining chip and all.

But at any rate, there is a huge refugee camp in Mexico. It’s gigantic; it makes Hartisheik and Dadaab look like a family camping trip. And the president has set up shop there. Yes, that’s right, President not-Cheney (formerly Vice President not-Cheney, but he became president after President not-Bush died) is also a refugee. He, however, still commands the military, which saved some helicopters, and at the end of the story he sends them to New York to get the man who tried to warn him about everything. Oh, and anybody else who might have survived. Never minding how the devil they got there all the way from Mexico without refuelling (in Chinooks or similar models, too, which are supposed to have a range of about 500 miles…) or how they plan to get back, the President, in a televised broadcast that goes out exactly as the surviving people are being rescued, says that he’s done this. Specifically, he says, “I’ve ordered an immediate search and rescue mission to bring them home.”

Home. It sounds absolutely wonderful, doesn’t it? They survived, they’re alive, they’re going to go home. Everyone can be happy.

Except “home” is in freaking Mexico. What gives President not-Cheney the right to welcome them “home” to Mexico? Home implies ownership. It implies a sense of belonging, and so on and so forth. If he were simply welcoming them to the refugee camp, welcoming them back to the remnants of American society, that would be one thing. Or if he were anyone else but the leader of the aforementioned remnants, perhaps he could get away with welcoming them “home” to Mexico. But when it’s the President of the US, it seems a bit presumptuous to welcome anyone home to Mexico.

I wonder if the writers thought about that before they wrote it? Was it a feel-good line, or did they purposefully stick a statement with such shades of Manifest Destiny into the movie?

This all goes along with my pet theory about what happened the day after The Day After Tomorrow, by the way. I think that after America is frozen, the remnants of the US take over, or at least attempt to take over, northern Mexico. Yep, I think we just invade them and try to take the territory. Because President not-Cheney’s gratitude for Mexican hospitality aside, I don’t think Americans are equipped to become second-class citizens the way we make immigrants second-class in our society. I think we’d definitely have an armed uprising in that sort of situation.

Something that also occurred to me is that Catholicism and Islam would be the shapers of the future in the days after the end of the movie. White westerners being all dead (Europe was frozen too, see), China, India, Japan, &c. &c. being wiped out… We’ve got the Middle East left, and Latin America and Africa. I would love to see how that goes down, and what country fills the vacancy left by America.

But enough about The Day After Tomorrow. On to the second movie, Léon, The Professional. It’s about a hitman who takes in this girl whose entire family was shot to death right next door to him. She survived and is now going to be trained by him. And stuff. It’s really quite implausible.

The main thing I got from that movie is “never, under any circumstances, be poor in New York.” I mean, damn. People shoot off guns and everyone looks the other way? The cops try to kill people with RPGs? Holy cow. That leaves off obviously psychotic people in high positions in law enforcement with equally obvious thugs popping in and out of his office and… hmm. Well, that sounds kind of like Bow Street in the beginning but then again, this is America in the age of lawsuits and ass-covering. I really don’t think that someone quite so blatantly crazy would be high up in the D.E.A.

So there were some major flaws. But with a willing suspension of disbelief, everything works out. And it was quite a pretty movie; all the explosions were refreshingly noisy and destructive and the guns were awesome. Also Jean Reno and Natalie Portman did a fantastic job. Absolutely stunning; you could really believe that they were who they were purporting to be. Gary Oldman, however, managed to do something that I never really expected he would be able to do: he gave me to know the reason he was picked to play Sirius Black in the Harry Potter movies. I always thought he was exceptionally ugly for someone chosen to play a man described as being devilishly handsome, and I never understood that particular casting. Until now. He’s actually handsome in Léon! If quite insane…

I think I would have liked the movie, though, except for two things. I think the first is fairly obvious. The main character’s a hitman. Who can root for a hitman? Sure, he’s nice to the girl and he saves her and whatnot, but… he’s a hitman. His entire life revolves around killing people he doesn’t know so that he can be paid. And not even very well: one person is worth $5000. That’s the price of a life. Cheap, isn’t it? And you know he’s killed many, many people because he’s got massive credit stocked up with the mob boss (theoretically; I’d like to see him try to actually extract his money…). And he teaches the girl how to heartlessly kill people, too. Sins of the surrogate fathers or something, I suppose.

So really, how can I seriously connect with him and root for him?

I can’t. Which brings up the second problem. I can’t really connect with the little girl either. She’s twelve years old, bloodthirsty in the extreme, and can’t wait to lose her virginity. She had to walk right past her slaughtered family without batting an eye and has been beaten and stuff, but… twelve years old and she wants to kill people she doesn’t even know just for practice and she wants to have sex with a man a minimum of four times her age?

Sorry, I can’t connect with that.

No matter how tragic the back-story, there are just some things I can’t excuse. Killing with no motive but money is one of them.

So there you have it. My thoughts on these two movies, both watched and written about when I should have been studying for Algebra… oh well. Can’t study all the time, no?

I wouldn’t see either of them if you haven’t already.

Sunday Scribblings: Curves; or, The Witch of Agnesi

2008-06-01T20:25:00.000-07:00

I'm back after my work-induced hiatus! I read the prompt for this week’s Sunday Scribbling, and my first reaction was “what the hell?”

Not because it’s about curves, which is what it’s about, by the way. It was because of this sentence within the prompt: “In mathematics, the concept of a curve tries to capture the intuitive idea of a geometrical one-dimensional and continuous object.”

I wondered why it would have such an odd assortment of bolded words, plus things that are not continuous are called curves all the time around the math department at my university. So I, being the genius I am, went back to the prompt and discovered that the word “Winkipedia” was in fact a link to the Wikipedia article on curves. Then for no reason I thought of L’Hospital stealing Bernoulli’s work on curves, but that’s irrelevant to this discussion.

So I clicked the link and was taken to the Wikipedia article and, because I’m one of those special people who actually went and got a math degree, I understood this article. I knew exactly what it meant, except it was saying this bullshit stuff about curves. It was calling paths curves! The horror! And then I got to the part in the article where it says, Terminology is also not uniform. Often, topologists use the term "path" for what we are calling a curve, and "curve" for what we are calling the image of a curve. Aha! It all makes sense now! The fact that the article author doesn’t mention that most times the “curves” referred to are actually called “continuous mappings” is niggling but then again, it was probably an unemployed math graduate writing the article during unfilled spare time in the first place. You can’t expect too much.

But anyway, reading through the article, I see that the author pops down to the subject of the length of curves. I again disagree with his notation, since it’s much easier just to introduce the notion of polygonal paths over partitions of the [a,b] interval and go from there, but in any case, I can’t imagine anyone who didn’t already know this shit understanding it. It’s like out of nowhere he starts using supremums and Epsilon notation and mentioning Lipschitz-continuous and stuff. I don’t believe that supremums are generally introduced in undergrad math until upper division, and even then there’s usually three or four prerequisite upper division courses before you get there.

And then we get to the Curves in Differential Geometry section, and the author pulls manifolds out of the ass of mathematics, neglecting that you have to go through the mouth and esophagus and stomach and the entire rest of the gastrointestinal system to get there, and says it’s basic. Kind of makes you feel stupid if you don’t get it, doesn’t it?

This is a basic notion.

Well, yeah! Sure, that’s a basic notion! If you’ve spent four years of high school chugging through the mathematics programs to AP calculus and then a further four years in college devoted to a mathematics major and you took a topology course and 1) remembered what was said, 2) had a good enough teacher or book that you understood what was meant, 3) applied yourself to internalising it and 4) planned to continue on and make mathematics a part of your daily life. Then yes, it’s a basic notation.

But if you don’t fit that profile, it might as well be magical runes to you, mightn’t it?

Then I read further and the author casually mentions C^k, a notation and concept that was introduced to me in a course that was about half last-year BS (not BA, mind, BS, more rigorous degree) math students and about half graduate students. Oh yes. Basic. Moving on to Algebraic curves, there’s another basic notion, C(K). You’ll get bonus points from me if you can tell me the core difference between C^k and C(K). The last paragraph of this part looks mightily suspicious, like it was ripped from a textbook somewhere.

And the history of curves… dude. This part is full of half-assed shit. But whatever.

Moving on to more interesting topics than the criticism of the supercilious writing of one author by another equally supercilious one, let’s talk about how the Marquis de L’Hospital stole Bernoulli’s work! The great betrayal of one mathematician by another, scintillating accounts of how all of integral calculus was… all right, fine, it was early intellectual theft and L’Hospital got away with it because he was an aristocrat, so it was also the rich taking advantage of the poor. What else is new?

What about the Witch of Agnesi? The Witch of Agnesi, the curve yx² = a²(a – y). It looks witchy, doesn’t it? The name arises from an interesting and quite disturbing story of repressed homosexuality and horrific murder.

Maria Agnesi, a young, disaffected woman who was the only daughter of Baron Ludmillio Agnesi, had learned to speak Italian, Latin, Greek, Spanish, French, German, and Hebrew by the time she was eleven. This unnerving display of intelligence frightened her father, and he forbade her to learn anything else. Higher knowledge was restricted from her, and she was locked in her room when it was discovered that she was secretly visiting the family library at nights and learning mathematics and physics.

She escaped from the prison her family had caged her in and fled the Agnesi estate and Italy entirely, disguising herself as a man and travelling to England. Here she caught the eye of a beautiful young noblewoman, who did not know that Maria was cross-dressing, and the two began a whirlwind romance that ended in marriage and, that night, shock and horror on the part of the noblewoman when she discovered that Maria was not, in fact, a man. Maria persuaded her to keep quiet and try and give the marriage a go, but in the end, the noblewoman was not able to persuade herself that Maria was the one for her. She fell in love with a nobleman and began to have an affair with him.

Unable to catch the eye of the woman she loved, Agnesi’s life went down the drain, and she once again had to flee when her wife’s paramour found out about her, this time right ahead of the hangman’s noose and charges of homosexuality and impersonating a man. She fled to Prussia, and it was here she first killed. About to be raped, she stabbed a man in his neck and he died. She carved the last equation she had learned before she left home, yx² = a²(a – y), into his chest. She then began a murderous killing spree that spread across Prussia and Flanders, always carving that equation into the bodies of her victims. This equation, which looked mystical to people not in the know about math, and the knowledge that she was a woman (and of course in those times any woman capable of killing so many fine, superior men must by definition be in league with the Devil) inspired people to start calling her a witch.

When she was finally captured, she gave her name as Maria Agnesi and her last words before she was burned to death were “yx² = a²(a – y).” She was actually silenced by an arrow to the throat because people thought she was calling on the Devil, and thus was spared the pain of burning to death. Ever since, the equation has been called, “the Witch of Agnesi.” Interesting, ne?

Actually, that’s pretty much entirely bullshit, except that she was called Maria Agnesi and she did learn all those languages. But in fact it’s called the Witch of Agnesi because the book that Agnesi wrote, Instituzioni Analitiche, was mistranslated: versiera (the versed sine curve) was mistranslated as “wife of the devil”, or witch (avversiera being the actual word for wife of the devil).

My story was more interesting. Or at least more fun to write. Anyway, I don’t really have much to say on curves except this. Curves are pretty. I like curves. Curves are my friends. My thoughts meander around crookedly just like they do!

Oh, and how many of you peeps understood that Wikipedia article? Honestly?

Sunday Scribblings: Telephones

2008-05-12T00:03:00.001-07:00

Telephones. That’s the prompt for this Sunday’s Scribbling. I suppose there are three things that I think about when I hear the word. I might as well tell you about them.

The first is magic. Telephones are magical. They can take your voice and instantaneously transmit it to the other side of the world, as clearly as if you were standing next to the person on the other end of the line. Obviously, this can only be attributed to magic. I’m sure that someone somewhere could explain to me (very probably in a condescending tone that would get on my nerves) that really telephones work by sending out electrical impulses that are received by the other end or what have you. I don’t know how they actually work, as you see. I think it’s magic. Because even if it were little electrical impulses and suchlike, how the hell do all the wires stay connected and the impulses all go the right places and furthermore, how do they travel that fast, and even further, how can they replicate my voice? I mean, they’re little electrical impulses. They don’t have vocal cords!

Oh, and mobile phones and internet telephony? You know, where it goes out over the wireless? How come that doesn’t get misdirected ever? Or does it? Do we send out signals in expanding spheres so that maybe sometime, some hundreds of years from now, archaeologists of the future will do their research into the more eclectic areas of our ancient culture by taking spaceships out a few hundred radio-years and tuning in with signal interceptors? I wonder if they’ll be able to reconstruct my social security number from the signals my mobile gave out when I pushed the buttons to enter it into the substitute-teaching network.

But anyway, like I said, phones are magic, without a doubt.

The second thing that I always think about when I actually think about phones, actually stop to consider them, is how much they’ve changed. I remember when mobile phones were these huge things as big as a couple of cucumbers stuck together. I’m 23, but I have a good memory. They were the thing back then, these giant mobile phones, and the coolest people in the movies had them. You knew they were cool because they had these high-tech phones. But today? Someone with a phone like that would be laughed at! These days, mobiles are as big as a couple of sheets of paper stuck together. And the things they can do! I have an iPhone, and it’s like having an extremely small laptop. Incredible. I wonder what those people with huge mobiles in the late eighties and early nineties would have said if they had seen it.

And the last thing about phones that always strikes me is this: Why are so many people married to them?! It’s like mobiles are the most important thing on earth. So many times I’ve been talking to someone and their phone rings and it’s “Oh, excuse me, I have to take this now.” What is that all about? If that happened in a personal conversation, it’d be considered so rude. You’re talking to your friend and suddenly another friend comes up and taps her on the shoulder, and they have a conversation between themselves, before the other friend leaves without so much as a hello. It’d be so rude. But it’s okay if it happens on a phone, because everyone seems to understand that phone calls must be taken. And I’ve gotten into cars with people, only to have to turn around and drive back fifteen minutes later because they forgot their phones. Because, you know, a person wouldn’t survive three hours without a phone.

But even despite this fanatical devotion that phones inspire in some people, I really have to say that I like them very much. They give me something to ignore that won't have its feelings hurt when I do. And they’re magic. You have to love magic.

The Rorschach Dust Cloud

2008-05-10T20:49:00.000-07:00

Ok. Maybe I'm juvenile (actually, I know I am, but I consider it as one of my best traits) but... does anyone else look at this Dust Cloud and see something other than a dark tower?

It's the Dark Tower in Scorpius, a cosmic dust cloud formed by things that I don't understand and can't explain. Dark tower. It's not a dark tower!

Ladies and gentlemen, I present the Cosmic Penis!

It totally is! I swear! This is not just in my dirty mind!

Sunday Scribblings: Family

2008-05-04T12:28:00.000-07:00

I’ve decided to start up Sunday Scribbling again. Good practice. It’ll flesh out my blog. I might not make it every time, but hey, it never hurts to try. The prompt this week is Family. What does the word family bring up for you?

Not a good question to ask me, because if you’re asking about the word as it pertains to most of my relatives that are not in my nuclear family, the answer is “my lunch.” Harsh, but honest. I could go into details, but there’s this thing called “family loyalty.”

I have large amounts of this, possibly too large. I never talk about the things that have gone seriously wrong in my family to outsiders. I sometimes don’t talk about some of the things that have gone wrong even with people in my family, out of respect for the cohesion of the family unit. Why break people’s trust with old wrongs when everyone’s fairly happy as is? I keep a close lid on problems in my immediate family.

It’s mostly the same with my extended family, only this is out of respect for my parents. The people in question are their brothers and sisters and nephews and nieces, so it seems discourteous to my parents to spread around dirty laundry about their siblings while they’re still living. Except that I will brush the snow off the tip of the iceberg and say that women are very well suited to be mathematicians, Uncle, thank you very much, and how dare you tell your daughter that she’s only good for making more children to bring into the church?

However, I don’t have problems boasting about my immediate family, and I don’t have problems talking about my dead relatives. I decided that since I boast about my family on a regular basis, today I’ll tell you about the dead relatives instead. I have three relatives that have died, a shockingly small number when you consider that my mum comes from a family of four and my dad from a family of six, and each of their married siblings (which number includes all but one) has a minimum of two children, usually three or four, and one aunt has seven. So to tell you about my dead relatives, which is not the same thing as my dead family.

There was my cousin, Sean. He died in a car accident when he was sixteen, some years ago. I only met him once before then, and I was a young child. I don’t have a very good memory of him. This is what I remember: He smiled, and I thought he looked kind. I also remember I was too young to go to the funeral. I would have been happy to consider him family, I think.

There was my grandfather, Orville. He died some years ago as well. He was the most awesome grandfather ever, even though biologically speaking he wasn’t my grandfather. He was the second husband of my mother’s mother, and he loved her so obviously that… well, it was kind of painful to see the disparity in the levels of affection. He was one of those marvellous people that you always remember for the rest of your life. I have nothing but the best to say of him. I remember that he never raised hand or voice to anyone, he always listened when I talked to him and took me seriously, he always knew how to make things better, and he knew how to make zillions of interesting things like Möbius strips and cooty catchers. I wrote letters to him when he moved and I drew pictures of the animals from Bambi for him and he always wrote back and said what he particularly liked about the drawings. I could keep on in this vein for pages and pages and not finish singing his praises. He was the best grandpa ever. He was family.

And then there was the other grandfather, whose name I don’t remember and whose face I have forgotten. That bastard died not so many years ago, and good riddance to him. I moderate my language out of courtesy to those reading this, and suffice it to say there was no worth in him, no good thing about him, and that if I had my way, he would not have died the relatively peaceful way that he did. Even though he didn’t actually stop breathing all that many years ago, he was dead to me long before that; specifically, when he fled the state right ahead of the police. And no, the crime wasn’t anything to do with me, but it was to do with those close to me, and it cannot be forgiven, not if I were Jesus himself. Especially not when I keep finding out about more and more ways that he blackened this earth with his presence in recent years, all just as horrible as that. This man, though related to me, was never family. I will not have him called that.

I realise I haven’t fully answered the question in the prompt (I’ve just told you about some of my family, brought up by the question), but then, I will never be able to. The word family brings up too many things to ever be properly explained. Family is security. Family is trust. Family is pride. Family is pain. Family is joy, success, value. I could tell you many things that family is not, as well, but principally, blood relation is not equivalent to family. You are not born with your family, you choose your family. It might take many years before you realise it, and people often choose their blood relations as family, but everyone chooses their family.

You choose what the word means for you. It’s not a given.

Jane Eyre: A Cure For All Ills

2008-05-02T01:44:00.000-07:00

I’m back to posting on my sadly neglected blog. Yay! Do people still read it?

I was supposed to post about Kristin’s visit to California before I did anything else, but I haven’t got words for how awesome that was yet. I’d give details, but I find when I try to write about it, my vocabulary becomes restricted to the superlatives-only section of the dictionary. Awesome. Fantastic. Life-changing, even. Hyperbole, you say? Hello! She came all the way to California, from Norway, to visit me (and my sister, but me is the part of it that I’m focused on), someone who’s always been told she was second-rate and further, had “friends” that would not bother to drive two miles to see her all through childhood and university (seriously, I always had to go to them, never them to me, ever. No one even asked if they could come over). It’s quite reasonable for me to be without words to describe the event of someone travelling 5,300 miles to see me.

So I’m writing about other things for which I have got the words. Jane Eyre!

A few days ago, I watched the 2006 BBC production of Jayne Eyre. This being the first time I watched it I was on the edge of my seat. I always am with films I haven’t seen before. But this was Jane Eyre, so it was a thousand times worse. Can you tell that I love period films yet? No? Go look at my list of favourite books, realise that there’s films only of the Victorian ones, and come back. I have to say that Jane Eyre didn’t beat out my all-time favourite miniseries, North and South, but it drew level with Pride and Prejudice, which is only a nose behind.

Anyway, I was going to tell you how it went.

I came home that day (which was Thursday, 28 April, 2008, if you wanted to know) feeling quite miserable because I’d just had to substitute for a classroom full of verminous creatures; ceramics was the subject. Every one thought they were making beautiful clay figures, but in fact, they were making ugly clay blobs. Too harsh, I should be more supportive, especially given my own experience? Well, I didn’t tell them their blobs were ugly. (I didn’t say any of them were pretty, either, though, because the last time I did that with this class another student smashed the blob of the student that I complimented on the floor. I told you they were verminous creatures.) And then, in fifth period, they started throwing clay at the walls.

Here’s the embarrassing thing: I didn’t catch them at it. I didn’t even notice the clay on the walls (it was about eight to twelve feet up on the wall) until sixth period students pointed it out to me. I heard fifth period slinging it about, but it was always behind my back, and I never saw anyone moving suspiciously, and no one looked guilty. And they never threw clay when I’ve subbed before, so I didn’t know what the noise was. And you really couldn’t expect me to think of looking for thrown clay because… well, because I would never think of throwing clay in the first place. Why would anyone do that? It’s so much more fun to make it into ugly blobs.

Anyway, as previously mentioned, the clay was stuck to the walls (because clay sticks to walls when it’s thrown hard enough, in case you didn’t know) from the eight foot height to about twelve feet and it took me forever to clean it off after the creatures left. Forever. I was tired and pissed and miserable.

And then I watched Jane Eyre with my sister, Jess. I swear, Jane Eyre could cure a person with cancer. All right, maybe not, but it lifted me right out of my funk.

I was continually squashing my sister. I was equally continually bouncing on my seat after the manner of an insane bus passenger or a small child that needs to use the water closet. The course of the movie went thusly:

It starts. I feel a kinship to the poor kid, punished by being put in the red room she hates. My funk from work gets worse as I see what happens to the child. We move along in the story and then! She comes to Thornfield. Yay! Everything’s looking up and then! Mr Rochester almost runs over her and then! What will happen next?! I probably look like I haven’t peed in a century by this time. Everything happens as it must: Mr Rochester falls in love, and Miss Eyre also. Of course I intrinsically know Mr Rochester will propose to Miss Eyre. I might as well just wait for it to happen. But all the same, I keep rooting for him to tell her he loves her, and he keeps not doing it, and I get this huge “AUGH!” feeling every time he fails to tell her. This happens without pause through the entire first disc and twenty minutes into the second disc, and then we get to the scene where Miss Eyre is in the garden with Mr Rochester.

She says she’ll advertise immediately, he tells her she won’t; he already found her a place. “As his WIFE!” I tell her for him, but she doesn’t hear. She remarks that Ireland is a long way from him. I have to pause the disc so I can make noises. “Heeeeehehehehe! Aaawwww! A long way from hiiiiim! Hmmmmhmmm, awwwwww!” Then he goes on about friends, so I have to remind him that she is really obviously in love with him, and ask him why he has to torture her like that. He doesn’t pay attention, the bastard. Then she says “I love Thornfield!” Like, hello! She’s telling him! Bouncing on the edge of my seat sadly makes no difference in the pace of the film, but soon enough we get to, “You will not leave me, Jane!” This necessitates more pausing so that I can make even more noises: “D’aaaaw! Bloooooobo! Eeeeee!” Finally! Yes! All right! He’s gonna do it!

Mr Rochester proposed to Miss Eyre. That was the point where I started making baby noises. I sounded like an infant. Jess mentioned that she could envision exactly how the conversation where my husband proposes to me will go.
Future Husband: I offer you my hand, my heart, and all my possessions.
Me: GOO!
And then when he kisses me, I’ll walk two fingers along his shoulder and croon, “Wooo-dee-doooo!”

Yes. It is a fact: I’m hopeless when watching these sorts of films. But I enjoy love stories so much that I don’t care!

I just watched it for a second time, by the way, which is why you’re reading this post. Upon this second watching I noticed something that I didn’t particularly note the first time: Mr Rochester is, of people in films that I’ve seen, the man who actually looks the most impassioned when he kisses his girl. He just presses his lips to hers, like he has to touch her, like he has to let her know he was serious that he loves her. His mouth is very nearly closed. It’s not like he’s trying to eat her face off, as I’ve seen other heroes in other films do.

I’m going to digress here to say I’ve always thought face-eating kisses really gross-looking. I have to say ‘gross-looking’ because I’ve never been kissed and thus have no basis to talk about feeling gross-looking—yes, you read that right, ‘never been kissed,’ at 23 years of age. ‘Ye gods! How did that happen?’ I hear you say? Very easily: I never went out with someone I wanted to kiss. I have met a couple, but neither of them showed any signs of wanting to kiss me. So sad. Anyway, back to the original digression… Perhaps I find face-eating kisses to be gross-looking because I associate them with pubescent creatures in high school hallways, but in any case, I just think they’re nasty. Maybe they’re absolutely fabulous things to experience, but when you see a fourteen year old drooling on a thirteen year old, it kind of puts you off your food, never mind that kind of kissing.

Any rate, Mr Rochester kisses very romantically, to my way of thinking. I’ll nominate him for MTV’s Best Kiss any day.

And now that I’ve blogged your attention span away, I’ll quite raving about Jane Eyre. Except to say that you must watch it. Even you types that find such things boring. Rochester almost gets burnt up twice! That’s gotta be enough excitement for you. Watch it.

My Cat Died Today

2008-03-07T15:18:00.000-08:00

It was cardiomyopathy. He was the best cat ever. No lie.

Pretty People and Me

2008-03-04T15:17:00.000-08:00

You know who they are when you see them. They’re the people that other people look at, that you sometimes ask where they did their hair or got their clothes from, the people who look good and are attractive to the opposite sex (and in some cases the same sex). The pretty people.

My sisters are pretty people. The older has modelled and the younger is going to. And people tell them they’re beautiful, both of them. “You look like a dancer. You have such graceful posture.” “You’re so gorgeous!” “I wish I looked like you.” “You have such a beautiful face.”

And they tell me, too. “Your sister is so beautiful.” “Your sister is so elegant.” “I’ve never seen anyone who dresses as well as your sister. Where does she shop?” “I wish I had your sister’s skin.” “I wish I had your sister’s hair.” “I wish your sister was my teacher.” “Your sister is sexy.” “Your sister is the most beautiful woman in the world.” That last one married the sister in question, though, so it’s possibly a biased statement.

Can I be proud of this? Absolutely. I am happy for my sisters that they are attractive and beautiful. It makes life much easier for them, and it makes them happy when people compliment them.

But sometimes, I can’t help but feel just the tiniest, weeniest pangs of overwhelming jealousy. Because them? They’re beautiful.

Whereas me, the best compliment I ever got from a guy was, “I don’t think you’re fat.”

No, seriously. It was a security guard outside a bank that said it, when he saw me walking to my car, which has a bumper sticker from when I was forty pounds heavier (hard to imagine, I know, but I have been). He meant it, and he looked at me like I was attractive.

That’s honestly the best I ever got. Of the people I’ve dated, few and far between, I never even got a “You look good” or a “That’s a nice dress/hairstyle.” Nothing. Trust me, it would be one of my most precious memories if I had.

Back when I looked like this, that is to say, fourteen or fifteen, I asked a boy out. Yes, I did, go me, I had the courage to do that then. And he didn’t come. I got stood up for a ball game. He was one of my brother’s friends, and when I asked my brother what was wrong with me, why he didn’t come, guess what the answer was? “Well, maybe if you were less heavy, he’d go out with you.”

I look at the photo now, and I do not think I was excessively heavy at the time. In fact, pardon the vanity, I think I was beautiful then.

But also at that time, my nickname in my family was “Fat Robin.” Why did I have to eat so much, why couldn’t I be skinny like my sisters? Lisa, Lisa, the big fat pizza. You eat too much dessert, that’s why you’re fat. You already had enough, you don’t need seconds. He got more because he isn’t fat. Sure, go ahead and eat that, if you really think you can afford the calories. I’m really shocked, Liz, that you eat so much when you look the way you do.

So I ate less. And less, and less, and even less. From the time I was fifteen to the time I was twenty, I was starving nearly all the time. And I stayed the same weight, and then, I started gaining weight. And then I got two metabolic disorders diagnosed, but still it’s the same old Liz eats like a pig, that’s why she’s fat. So then I did start eating until I didn’t feel like I was starving, and I gained astronomical amounts of weight.

Now I’m down forty from my heaviest and still losing weight. But I haven’t got insurance, and so I have only one of the meds I need, and thus, if I eat more than about 1200 calories a day, I gain weight. That’s about half of what people my age and height are supposed to require. And I have to eat even less to lose weight.

I’d have to say I’m still not one of the pretty people, and guys certainly aren’t going to be noticing me any time soon.

But come on, Liz. You can’t really be serious that no one ever said you were beautiful? I never said that. Three people have said I’m beautiful. Yeah, I counted.

My older sister has said I’m beautiful. But, since that same older sister has said before that she doesn’t want people to know we’re sisters, because I am 1) too fat, 2) scarred on my face and 3) too unfeminine, adding up to a grand 4) too ugly, I must doubt the sincerity of the statement.

My younger sister has said I’m beautiful. I think she means it, but then again, she says it quite a lot. It almost seems a case of “The lady doth protest too much, methinks” in the original affirming sense of protest. Maybe if she didn’t insist that I’m more beautiful than people that look like Helen Hunt and Hilary Swank, I might have an easier time believing. Maybe if she was like my mum, and said “You could be beautiful,” I’d believe. Or maybe my self-doubt is just pathetically all-consuming and I should take what she says at face value.

And my best friend has said I’m beautiful. It’s much easier for me to believe what she says, because she says I’m not classically beautiful, but I have a different kind of beauty. Is it pathetic to hope she really thinks that?

But those three people, that’s the extent of those willing to say I’m beautiful. Am I just the slightest bit bitter and defensive about the way I look? You bet your ass I am. Deal with it, is all I can say, because it isn’t going to change in the foreseeable future.

As a nice, polite closer: If anyone who knows me reads this and thinks I’m whining, fuck you too. I let you crap on me for years and years without arguing. You can listen to a little complaining now, or you can go have a seat on Judas’ chair.

Euphemisms

2007-11-05T13:02:00.000-08:00

I was surfing through the blogs that I read today, catching up on posts that I missed, and I came across this in the comment section of one of Ren Kat’s (Sidestepping Real) posts: “I always thought "intriguing" means "I don't quite get it". . .”

That’s something I always thought, too. Well, actually, that’s not quite true. I didn’t always think that until Ren said it, at which point in time I realised I always thought that.

It’s a word like “interesting.” Opening a Christmas present. It’s an elegant replica of a famous statue that you never really thought was quite all that. It matches nothing in any of your rooms, and it serves no useful purpose, and you didn’t even think the original was very beautiful. Are you going to say that? Of course not. It’s “interesting.” Perhaps “different.”

It’s like “I know.” You’ve known a friend, maybe for years; from church, from work, via another friend, whatever; male or female as the case may be. She tells you what she wants you to know about her. You tell him what you want him to know about you. You do stuff together. You like the friend. And then, platonic though the friendship is, the friend says “I love you.” And that’s when you’re supposed to say “I love you, too.” But you don’t. To you, the friendship is not all that far past utility. So you say “I know.”

Or maybe you say “I love you, too” and that’s your euphemism for “I don’t love you, but I don’t want to hurt you by telling you that.”

And there’s, “What’s the matter?” Tell me so that I can get out of this awkward situation as fast as possible.

“I’d rather not talk about it.” Stop snooping and get the hell out of my life.

“I’m fine.” I have a shit life at the moment, but I don’t want to seem pathetic whining to you about it.

Except there’s also “I’m fine.” I’m at the top of my game, things could not be better, but I’ll seem like a big-headed boasting prick if I tell you about it, plus I know things aren’t that great for you so it seems insensitive to be so happy.

I always wondered if it really would hurt that badly, of course, if euphemisms were dropped. You can always tell when they’re in use. You give someone a present that’s deemed “interesting.” Of course they don’t like it. Couldn’t that be said? So did you like your present? “I don’t like it all that much, sorry.” Why not? “Because it’s useless/ugly/whatever.” And then you’d know what to get next time, that they would like.

But no one can say that on opening a present. It’s too selfish. You got them a present, and they didn’t like it, and they said so? Horrors! Even if they say they appreciate the thought (a very good euphemism, except that in my case it’s true and now I can’t use the phrase because it’s a common euphemism) they obviously didn’t really, or they wouldn’t have criticised it.

But anyway.

Today, I’m going to tell you that I haven’t blogged recently because “I’ve been busy.” This is my euphemism for “I think I’ll sound like a whiner if I say what was really holding me up, because I know people, even some who read this, who have it so much worse.”

But I am all right, were you wondering, and I am back. It’s good to be alive.

Sunday Scribblings: Powerful

2007-09-30T11:07:00.000-07:00

The prompt for this week’s Sunday Scribbling is powerful. When do you feel most powerful? I did something I usually don’t do this week, which was to procrastinate on writing about it and to read other people’s posts first. Some people think that they were powerful as children, and some feel powerful as adults. Some feel powerful as women—it seems especially as women who have given birth, and some because they are men. Some write about the use of power. Myself, I had to think about personal power for a while, because it’s usually something I avoid thinking about at all.

First I thought I would say I felt powerful as a child. But the moment I thought about that I started laughing. I do sigh sometimes and think how great it would be to be a kid again. But the reason for that is not because I want to be powerful again, and have the confidence and resilience and imagined power of a child again. I never had the confidence in the first place, although I did have more resilience, and I still have all the imagined power.

The reason is because I was not powerful then.

I knew when I was a child that I was not powerful. All I had to do was look at my parents to know where power was. I wasn’t even powerful among children. My older sister was able to tell me to do anything and to shut me in a closet if I didn’t do it and she was upset about it. My older brother could roll me in a rug and sit on the end and reduce me to a screaming and gibbering claustrophobic animal. Both he and my younger brother could complain to my mother about anything and prompt her to send me to stand still with my face to the wall. Before I was home-schooled, I couldn’t prevent other children from putting clods of mud down my clothing. I was very aware that I was not a powerful child, nor important to many, although I suppose I did have the power to sit in the closet for long periods of time, and the power to stand very still in corners for even longer periods of time, and not be bothered by it.

But when I was a child, because I was not powerful, I was not expected to use power wisely. I had no responsibility. If I goofed, someone else would fix it. I did not have to think about the consequences of my actions, and how I could make life better or worse for someone.

And I used to run and jump off the roof because I was sure with a fast and high enough start that I could fly. Then after three or four times I realised that, as my friend says, “Gravity was inevitable.” But I’d run and jump again and again anyway, even knowing that I couldn’t fly, because I could pretend I was flying, that the fall was merely the start of flight, and because there was always that tiny hope that maybe this time might be different.

Of course it never was—I never flew. But I did jump. As I’ve grown older I’ve lost the ability to jump off the roof. Because now I am powerful. I have the power to own my mistakes and take the gaff myself. I have the power to make things better for other people, and I have the power to make things worse. If I need something done, I know people who can and will help me get it done, because I have the power to ask or persuade them to do it. I am a single, white, western woman impeded only by other western women in my rise to greater power.

Well, them and myself. If I do not think about what I am doing, but set myself on a path and focus on reaching the end of it, I do great. I’m certain I can get there, and I have the power to do it. That’s how I graduated from university, that’s how I wrote my first story, that’s how I’ve done everything major I’ve ever done in my life. I thought about it in the beginning and then took a breath and dove, continuing straight on without giving it thought. Most people who meet me think I’m singularly determined, but really I only seem that way because if I did not plunge ahead, I would never get anything done.

Because as soon as I think about power, and if my actions are increasing my own personal power, I freeze up and become indecisive. That’s why I did not apply to graduate school while I was in university and am running around trying to apply now. I’m still worrying about it. Would it be better to go for the thing that would surely help me—should I get a one-year education degree that would guarantee me a stable job? Or should I do the Ph.D.? I love math, and the only people in my school that would not help me are the female professors and secretaries. But do I really love math that much, or is it just to prove myself to my family? Am I creative enough to come up with a Ph.D. dissertation? Should I get any sort of degree at all, or should I just continue substitute teaching until I sell a book?

Today I feel that if I jump off the roof, I certainly won’t fly, but I might break a leg and have to pay for the enormous hospital bills (health insurance, you ask, and I laugh) and certainly if anyone saw me jumping off roofs they would think I was suicidal. I have to think about these sorts of things, because if I take a risk and it turns out bad, I’m the one that has to fix it.

But until I start thinking about it, I do fine. Until I start thinking about everything that I do in terms of advancement and loss, power and control, I’m great. When I was a kid, I never thought about that, and nothing mattered to me. I sometimes wish for that back, but then again, my childhood was kind of miserable. I just want to be able to not worry about it.

So the answer, for me, to the Scribblings prompt is: I am most powerful when I do not think about power at all.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go jump off the roof. I’ll let you know how it goes.

My Byronic Hero

2007-09-23T17:08:00.000-07:00

Well, plans failed, as sometimes plans will, so here I am, writing when I thought I wouldn’t be. I haven’t anything else to do at the moment, so I’m going to feel free to write as much as I want. You can feel free to read as much or as little as you want, too.

I just finished watching the 1993 film version of Wuthering Heights. Despite the fact that it had Ralph Fiennes’ incredible voice in it, I managed to dislike it intensely. It wasn’t because the actors were bad—Fiennes had the best death stare that I’ve seen that wasn’t on a dead person. It wasn’t because so very many of the historical details were off. It wasn’t because the haircuts were hideous early nineties rat-nests, although that didn’t help. It was partly because of the music, but I could probably have gotten over that if it weren’t for what the cause of my dislike for the movie was mainly the result of.

I didn’t like the movie because I didn’t like the book.

I had no sympathy for Heathcliff. I had no sympathy for Catherine Earnshaw. The rest of the characters I formed no attachment to, except perhaps Ellen. For me, the book was simply a Gothic Romance, by which I mean Early Victorian Emo. I know, heresy for me to criticise the great literary masterpiece and all, but there you have it. I either like books or I don’t, and this was one of the don’ts.

I usually detest Byronic heroes. I sometimes like the stories that go on around them, but I usually hate the gentlemen themselves. I think I should have found Byron himself insufferable, had I ever met him, and he I. It’s not that Byronic men are too mysterious for me, or that they’re incomprehensible. I can understand most Byronic heroes. I just don’t like them.

Which brings me to the subject of this post (yes, I wandered a bit getting here, didn’t I?): I have finally found a Byronic hero that I absolutely love. Who is it that breaks through the instinctive dislike?

Severus Snape.

Yes, from the Harry Potter books. If you’ve never read them or never particularly bothered to remember them, allow me to briefly outline his Byronic nature. He is a loner, disliked even by his peers; before this he was an outcast during his school days; he has a very troubled past, including childhood abuse by his family members; he suffers to the end of his days from unrequited love (and without the hope of resolution, since the object of his affections is dead); his chief descriptors are terms like “dour” and “gloomy” and “brooding”; he is arrogant, demanding, and cynical; he suffers from a conflict of emotions over his self-imposed penance; he has trouble maintaining the integrity of his judgement around Harry Potter and matters involving the boy; he feels no need to conform to public opinion and in fact despises it in many instances; and he has certain things about him, such as his willingness to hurt people, his pettiness, and the murders he’s committed, that are not generally considered heroic traits.

Phew. Yeah, I know, brief. Anyway, from these and other observations, I’ve decided that he is one hundred percent Byronic hero. And I do love him so very much. He is, in fact, the reason I read anything past the middle of the fourth book.

My relationship to JK Rowling’s books over the years went like this: At thirteen, I read the first book, a year after it’s published. I quickly find a copy of the second and read it. At fourteen, I read the third book, and it becomes my favourite. At this time, Harry Potter is great. I love him. He does what I cannot, he stands up to teachers, he’s got great lines, &c &c. I adore him. Then at fifteen I read Goblet of Fire and two things have changed. One, Harry’s hit puberty, and two, I’ve gone to University. I no longer adore Harry Potter. I only read past the dragon fight because I want to see if the new idea forming in my mind is correct—that Harry Potter unjustly hates his Potions teacher.

The fifth book comes out. By this time I have been teaching under the supervision of another teacher while attending University full time, and I have been given a brand-new perspective with which to read the book: The perspective of someone who has already learned to hate students who emulate the behaviours of Harry Potter. I instantly take an extreme dislike to Harry Potter in book five, and cheer on his antagonists, especially the one teacher who dares to dislike him also. I resolve not to read the sixth book.

The sixth book comes out. I read it, because I must have the justification for my hero’s behaviour. I must know that he is not simply a ruthless villain supporting an even more ruthless villain but instead the hero that I believe him to be. I find the support I need in a single glimpse into his memory that the author provides. I know I am right. All is well in the world.

The seventh book comes out. I read it through (this morning, in fact), and for Severus I do what I have not done for Heathcliff and his ilk. I cry when he dies.

Yup. I liked him that much. I never wrote poems or drew pictures or any of that other stuff that some fans do (unless you count this blog post), but I gave him the greatest compliment I can give a literary character. I bought books because of him.

I am Severus!

Congratulations if you read to this point. I think I’ll quit before my mental stability is thrown into any more question. But a question to answer, if you will: Have you a favourite Byronic hero? Who and why?

Sunday Scribblings: Hi, My Name Is...

2007-09-22T01:55:00.001-07:00

I won’t be around net access on Sunday, most likely, so here it is, a day early. This is, for the record, not at all pretty much modelled off of conversations I’ve had at a new job in the past, with the names and places changed to protect the not-so-innocent. Not at all. Why would you suspect such a thing?
___________________________

Week 1, Monday, Emerson High School, Main Office
“Young lady? Young lady? Hello, young lady. You’ll need to sign in and take a visitor badge, please. No, they’re the ones over there, with “Hi, My Name Is _____”. Yes, those ones. Is this your first day? Who have you got? Ooo, Mrs Wallerstein’s classes! They’re a real handful. If you have any trouble just send the problem up here with a referral. Oh, the forms are in that box. Sure, no problem; see that desk back there? That’s Miss Buchanan, she handles subs. You’re welcome. Thanks, you too.”

Week 1, Tuesday, Emerson High School, Main Office
“Hello! You’ll need to sign in and take a visitor badge, please. Janice, hmm? I have a cousin called that. Pretty name. Oh, Maria’s out today, she’ll be back tomorrow. The badge? That’s so security knows you’re supposed to be on campus. Yes, every day. I don’t know, school policy? It does seem kind of redundant, doesn’t it? You all have substitute IDs anyway, couldn’t they check those? Oh, there’s the first bell! Good luck!”

Week 1, Wednesday, Emerson High School, Main Office
“Young lady? Oh, hi. Haven’t you been here before? Mrs Wallerstein on Monday, that’s right. You’ll need to sign in and… yeah. Thanks, you too. Hey, young lady! You forgot your badge! You’re welcome. Can’t be on campus without one, you know. Thanks, you too.”

Week 1, Thursday, Emerson High School, Main Office
“Young lady? Oh, hi. You know the drill. Hey, you can’t put it on your purse, Janice. Because it has to be on where everyone can see it. There you go. That wasn’t so hard, was it? Thanks, you too.”

Week 1, Friday, Emerson High School, Main Office
“Young lady? Oh, hi. Of course I remember. Brittany. Yeah, the badges are helpful, aren’t they? Thanks, you too.”

Week 1, Friday, Emerson High School, Main Office
“Young lady, you forgot to sign in this morning. Hey! Where’s your badge! Did you take it off? That’s against school policy, young lady. I don’t want to see that again, do you understand? All right. Anyone can make a mistake once. Just don’t do it again. Thanks, you too.”

Week 2, Thursday, Emerson High School, Staff Entrance to Main Office
“Hey, what are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be at lunch with your friends? Oh, are you? I’m sorry, you look so young. I thought you were a student. You got your badge? Sure, come on in. Sorry about that. Haha, yeah, it is a nuisance, isn’t it? Sometimes I think they should just tattoo them to your foreheads. Yeah, but then at least Maria would know who you were at once. Have the students given you trouble at all? Really? Great! Hey, I’ll be out next week, let me have your sub number and I’ll request you. Yeah, they’re easy. Best kids in the school. And they’re doing the CHASEE for three days, so you’ll have an easy go. They’re real little angels, not like some of the classes. 3165? Got it. Yeah, Joe Wallerstein. Yeah, she’s my wife! Yeah, aren’t they great? Oh, there’s the bell. See you later!”

Week 3, Monday, Emerson High School, Joe Wallerstein’s Second Period Class
“Hey look, it’s her badge!”
“Give it here!”
“Write on it, Jesus!”
“What should I write? You write on it!”
“Give it here!”
“Haha! Way to go, Mario!”
“What?”
“What, now? Are you serious? Yeah, but I finished the test! What, them? They don’t care!”
“I’ll wait for you outside detention, bro.”
“Thanks, chamo. I’m going, I’m going. Geez, are you new or something? We always do this!”

Week 3, Monday, Emerson High School, Main Office
“Where’s your badge, young lady? I thought I told you not to take it off again. You have to wear it at all times. School policy. That’s not very funny, young lady. Are you trying to make fun of me? Displaying obscenities on or about your person is against school policy. I don’t care, young lady, one more incident like this and I’ll have to report you to the principal.”

Week 4, Friday, Emerson High School, Quad
“Young lady? Young lady! Young lady, STOP! Hey, what’s the matter with you?! Didn’t you hear me calling you? Yes, I was! Are you supposed to be out of class? A substitute? You’ll have to come up with a better one… oh. I’m sorry, ma’am. Hey, where’s your visitor badge? You’re not supposed to be on campus without one. Did you check in at the office? Come with me, please, I have to verify this.”

Week 4, Friday, Emerson High School, Principal’s Office
“You are Janice Smith? You know, Miss Smith, I’ve been listening to the talk about the office. It seems that you’ve had more than one problem with this sort of thing before. Are you trying to flout our educational policy? We have a system in place, Miss Smith, because we have found that system to work. Do you understand? We can’t have people running all over campus without identification, and when you attempt to disobey procedure, you send a message to our students. When you “lose” your visitor badge or scribble obscene humour on it, you send a message. Do you know what that message is? You are saying to our students that they can feel free to disobey, too. I understand that, but it is your responsibility to come to the office and get a new one. Miss Smith, I think you are being purposefully difficult. We in the administration have always tried to support our teachers and substitutes with as little hassle as possible, and you should return the favour. This kind of fuss is not something we need. Am I clear?”

Week 5, Monday, Lincoln High School, Main Office
“Hi, I’m Kelly, how are you this morning? Fine, thanks. What’s your name? Ah, let me see… Monica, right? Here’s the keys. Monica said to tell her sub not to let them use the TV, they’re in her class to do math even when she isn’t. What badge? Don’t be silly, that’s what you have a sub ID for. Here’s the map, we’re here, and Monica’s class is here. If you get lost, just ask one of the kids, they’ll help you. Have a nice day!”

Week 25, Thursday, Lincoln High School, Main Office
“Hi, Janice! Monica again today. Nate’s gonna ask you to do a period coverage, just warning you. Hey, you’ve been subbing here exclusively now for a while, haven’t you? Yeah, wow, almost six months! Why do you like Lincoln so much?”

Sunday Scribblings: Collector's Personality

2007-09-16T23:09:00.001-07:00

I started thinking about what I was going to write for the Sunday Scribblings prompt this week, and I was thinking about all the things that I collect.

I could say I collect the playing of musical instruments. I collect instruments that seem exotic (to Americans, which I will admit is not very difficult) and learn how to play them. I’m not very good at most, but I have a reckoning of all of them and can play my hardangerfele fairly well (laugh it up, Norwegians, but no here knows what it is :/).

I could say I collect sharp bladed objects, except I only really have ones that were given to me as a gift or that I thought were pretty on the spur of the moment. I never really set out to buy one on purpose. So am I really collecting them, or are they just accumulating?

I have a rack of DVDs and a steamer trunk full of books (because I ran out of space on my available shelves). But those books and DVDs were bought not because they were books or DVDs but because of the content they contained. Perhaps I’m collecting information? I definitely have a lot of unicorn paraphernalia and bric-a-brac. Throws and blankets with unicorns, pictures and clocks, tons of things. But I haven’t really bought something like that in five or six years. So that’s a past collection.

So then I started thinking about past things I’ve collected, searching for something suitably impressive to write about. I gave up on that idea quickly, since pretty rocks are generally underappreciated and my mum made me throw out my dead bugs collection when I was five. I think it was the still-living cockroach that ratted out my hiding place for it.

The past proving barren of interesting collections, I thought about ideas and less material things of that general abstract nature. But I don’t collect ideas, they just happen upon me; I don’t collect dreams, I only wish them; and I don’t collect years, they collect me.

So I gave up on writing about a collection of mine and decided to write a story about somebody else’s collection. Maybe I’d write about someone who collected jewellery, and write about where it came from. Or I’d write about someone who collected hair. Or cats. Or shampoo, possibly to be used on the cats or the hair. Or I’d write about a murderer who collected lives.

And then this story idea popped in my head, and I thought it would be fun to write about a person who doesn’t really collect things, but is more forced to collect them. Has to collect them. And then I thought it would be fun to try and see if I couldn’t write a story in the style of author X, so I gave it my best shot (which, as it turns out, is not very good, since I forgot whom I was trying to imitate halfway through and now I can’t tell from the finished product).

Any rate. The story follows.
_____________________________________

And now it actually doesn't follow, because I'm trying to get it published and I can't have it here no more.

It's Not What You Know, It's Who You Know

2007-09-14T14:17:00.000-07:00

As it so happens, my prediction of four days ago was entirely correct. The schmuck won. Unfortunately for him, the fifth fundamental force of nepotism did not exert a strong enough pull this time around, and he was forced to share his first place status with the Russian schlemiel.

I thought the Russian dude would win second, seeing as how he was only a student of the Russian judge, and the Hungarian bloc of voters was much bigger than the Russian bloc. I guess the Hungarian bloke really bungled his concerto. Sad, really, when a mere student of a jury member can tie with the nephew of the dean and the student of the President of the Jury. Where’s the sense in that?

Of the two third place winners, I predicted this one (also a student of the Russian judge) but missed out on this one. She was a wild card winner; I thought it would be this girl, the student of the Japanese judge.

But, all in all, I did a pretty fair job of predicting this one. I’ll have to try my hand at predicting other competitions as they come around. Or perhaps I should just become a medium right now.

The Wheel Keeps Turning… But It Only Matters To Those On The Rim

2007-09-10T22:04:00.000-07:00

The József Szigeti Violin Competition is one of the most prestigious violin competitions in the world. It’s not as important as the Indianapolis or the Queen Elizabeth, but it’s up there. It’s supposed to help aspiring musicians break into the world of concert performing and suchlike. Now, you’d think that, given all the preaching about helping young musicians get a leg up into a professional career, may the best player win, fairness of judging, &c &c, that the best player would, in fact, win.

Wrong.

The competition is not over yet. But I, a mediocre player at best since I can’t be bothered to practice the seven or eight hours a day it would require to be good, can tell you the exact characteristics of the person who will win. Even though I’ve displayed no previous aptitude for fortunetelling.

The winner will be Hungarian. He will be male. He will be the nephew of the dean of the Ferenc Liszt University of Music, where the competition is being held. He will be the student of the President of the International Jury judging the competition, and, as it so happens, one year younger than me. It will be this schmuck.

Does that seem fair to you? That I can predict with such ease? Yeah, it did to me too.

Sunday Scribblings: Writing

2007-09-09T14:18:00.000-07:00

She’s written one thousand, five hundred and forty-three pages of twelve point Times New Roman text in the last year. Perhaps fifty people have seen portions of it, and only two have read it all. The writing is commonplace, neither great nor terrible. She makes her errors, misspellings here and missing punctuation there, but no more than most and far less than some. It’s mostly prose, green shading to blue, rather than purple. She writes in response to the prompts other people give, and in turn prompts others to write. None of it is publishable—she hasn’t even tried. An editor would use the SASE after reading the first page.

But her sister read it all, as it was written, and she laughed and liked it, for the most part.

She writes about people, all sorts. Broken people, whole people, cracked people. Strong people, weak people, happy people, and sad people. She writes about sneaks, and she writes about honest blokes. She writes about hope and anger and love—sometimes too much. The people she writes about feel too much, or too little, and sometimes nothing happens to them so they don’t feel at all, but are put in her writer’s refrigerator to keep them fresh for later use. Every one of the people in the story is somehow connected to each of the others within three or four degrees, even the ones she doesn’t write about. She is the Kevin Bacon of the story. She tries to keep everything cohesive but sometimes it spirals away, stray wisps of hair blowing on the wind. Sometimes she’s happy with what she’s written, and other times not.

But her best friend read it all, as it was written, and she said she was happier and hopeful, for the most part.

She writes for a readership of two, sometimes more, and ignores her mother, who thinks it’s a waste of time. She smiles and nods to her father, who thinks it’s a form of social networking. She jokes with her brother, who sometimes writes with her. And she keeps on writing.

It’s worth it to her.

Final Fantasy: Advent Children

2007-07-26T11:33:00.000-07:00

After a long time of being too unmotivated to blog, I’ve come to the point where I am still too unmotivated to blog. However, since I’m also bored to tears, I’ve decided to amuse myself by writing down what I think of a movie I watched yesterday, Final Fantasy: Advent Children. Posterity will long be awed at my sparkling wit and keen observations, I’m sure.

Final Fantasy: Advent Children is about a lot of women who are really good at defying physics. They’re like Neo on crack. Most of them are about as flat as him, too. They fly around having graceful fights, being doused by water, and riding motorcycles through all kinds of debris; and they do this all without messing up their hair. Or even getting wet. You’d think there’d be a lot of she-looks-sexy-in-her-wet-clothes scenes, but nope, not a one. They stay bone dry no matter how hard it rains or how many pools they fall in. Before I tell you about the plot, let me introduce the characters.

Most of them are women. In fact there are four men in the entire movie (not counting the peons that are an unfortunate part of the masses destined to be killed to demonstrate how really evil the bad guys are). There’s Cid Highwind, a guy with a bit part if I ever saw one. There’s Loz, the crybaby brother of the two main bad chicks. Barret Wallace, the token black guy, is an oil driller who’s into fishnets and BDSM. And there’s Rude (yes, that is his name), one of those gentlemen of the suit and sunglasses persuasion, with the added twist of a multi-pierced ears. And that’s the entire cast of gents—oh, except possibly Clifford the big red dog might be a guy. Didn’t see any direct evidence one way or the other.

The women vastly outnumber the men. Cloud Strife is the main female lead in the movie. She’s a lesbian who’s hung up over this girl she knew in the past that turned into some kind of Earth mother type thing. Cloud is blaming herself for it, because you know it’s bad for your love to be turned into an all-powerful, immortal Earth mother, and so she’s having trouble in the day-to-day, withdrawing from her friends.

Then there’s the first of those friends, Tifa Lockhart. She’s really cool for about the first ten minutes of the film and then falls into the role destined for her: being the only woman with really big boobs. There’s also Reno, the red-haired wife of Rude. Rufus Shinra is an invalid woman who hides her face for most of the movie because she doesn’t want everyone to know she looks like Cloud without gel. Yuffie Kisaragi shows up late in the movie, with a bit part, along with Cait Sith (a stuffed animal) and Clifford. Vincent Valentine is the stern, strong type of girl.

Now then, the villainesses and villain. The main one is Kadaj, a badass woman with no other goal than to find Mum. Mum is the progenitor of Kadaj and her siblings, a disembodied head. Yazoo is Kadaj’s little sister, and Loz is their brother. There’s also Sephiroth, who shows up only at the end, expressing a desire to replace Cloud’s old girlfriend as the Earth spirit.

There, that’s the cast. Now, this is the way the movie goes: All of Cloud’s friends live in this city that’s partially destroyed. They’re bummed because of it, or perhaps because of the sadness that a useless girl mentions in the opening narration (apparently two years ago there was a huge struggle, and things got out of hand, and so the all-powerful Earth mother thing washed away the greed and sadness of the world, but… sadness was the price to see it end. Yes, that’s what she says. I don’t get it either.). Now, people in this city are getting a disease, because the planet is mad at them. That’s bad.

Cut to shabby bar. This is the headquarters of Strife’s Delivery Service. Why? No idea. Haven’t got a clue what she delivers either. Reno calls to tell Tifa that she’s got work for Cloud. She leaves a message for Cloud and Cloud goes to find out what it is. She gets attacked on the way in, by ferocious beasties at the beck of Kadaj, plus Kadaj’s siblings. They’re looking for their Mum, and they call her sister. Cloud is very unemotional about finding out that she has murderous siblings. Fortunately she gets away okay. The motorcycles, despite the abuse they go through, also make it out.

She goes on to meet Reno and get attacked by her, but defeats her in one move. That prompts Rude, Reno’s husband, to get edgy, but the bosswoman, Rufus Shinra, comes in and her cloaked presence calms him. They talk; it’s exposition time. Cloud gets told she’s needed as muscle, cause that’s always a good way to make friends. She says her muscle capability is all in her head, but, being curious about that Mum that Loz and Yazoo were talking about, stays to hear Shinra out. Some very unconvincing lies happen here too.

Then it’s time to move on. Tifa and a brat go to visit Cloud at the wrecked church where she lives and don’t find her. Tifa gets the opportunity to be cool when Loz shows up, but it turns out he’s the better fighter and she gets knocked out, after they ruin the church some more. Loz steals the brat and some important spheres. But meanwhile, Kadaj has beaten up Reno and her husband and is threatening Shinra. She’s angsty. Also during this time, Cloud is being overcome by memories. She goes back to the church too late to save anyone and in fact passes out to some really cheerful music.

When she comes to, she’s in a strange place. Reno and her husband, Rude, picked them up. Reno thinks Cloud is fat and her husband asks what’s been done with the kids Cloud lived with. They’re suspicious that she was living alone with them in a wrecked church, possibly. Eventually they go out looking for the missing brats. Meanwhile Kadaj absorbs some of the important spheres. Cut back to Cloud; we find out she’s worthless, in her own estimation. Reno comes back to say that they’ve found the kids.

Surprise surprise, we find out that Kadaj has the kids and is turning them into little monsters via a process of making them drink water she’s tainted by immersing herself to the waist in. We don’t even want to think about what it was that made the water that highly suspicious colour. She gives an inspirational speech where she psyches the kids up about dear old Mum. But oops! Now Cloud attacks! The glowing trees get heavy use as springboards, and Kadaj and her relatives proceed to attack Cloud with the mob of demon kids. Though Cloud can block bullets with her sword, she still can’t beat the peeps with edged weapons.

Cloud gets beat. A floating rag rescues her, which turns out to be an old lover, Vincent Valentine. Vincent’s depressed that her voice is that of a two-packs-a-day-for-thirty-years smoker, or perhaps because some buds of hers have been tortured. In any case, she helps Cloud get over her depression. The brat that was stolen from Tifa arrives, having escaped from Kadaj during the confusion, and is bratty. They go back home.

Next morning, there’s a mob of unsuspecting peons watching the demon kids behave oddly. Yazoo sets some beasties on them and they start to die. Tifa arrives in the confusion. Reno arrives with her husband. They start getting pounded by Loz and Yazoo. Meanwhile, high in a ruined skyscraper, Kadaj torments Shinra, because she’d do anything for Mum. She summons a gigantic beastie. Down below, Tifa is helpless, because as the chick with the biggest boobs, it’s preferable that they get as much notice as possible, which is difficult when you’re kicking ass. She’s near death many times as she tries to save a demon kid, but fortunately at this point the men of the movie start showing up to save her. Barret and Cid make their grand bit part entrance this way. Valentine shows up too, along with Yuffie, Cait Sith and the red dog.

Then Cloud shows up. Tifa is informed that Cloud thinks Cloud’s lost some weight (really!). I guess Reno’s gibe got to her. The huge monster is killing people by eating them in interesting ways, or barfing up spheres at them. A big battle happens. Cloud finally kills the monster by flying with the help of all her friends. While she’s doing that, Shinra’s finally revealing her resemblance to Cloud, plus showing Kadaj that she’s got Mum. Shinra throws the box containing Mum over the side of the ruined skyscraper, so Kadaj blasts her off for it. Kadaj has to dive over after Mum; Shinra tries to shoot her on the way down but has terrible aim. She does hit the box, however, breaking the cryo-seal on the disembodied head. Kadaj lands safely forty stories below. Shinra is saved from a gruesome death by two henchwomen that show up out of the blue.

Kadaj and her siblings see Cloud coming. This is frightful to them despite that they beat her up only yesterday night, so they run away. Cloud has to chase them onto an empty freeway. She almost gets decapitated eighteen times, and shot at a lot, but, fortunately, emerges without a scratch, as does her motorcycle. This is where we learn that the motorcycles are alive, and can be steered with the knees (and even feet) alone, like horses; and that they follow along faithfully waiting to catch their mistresses when the said feel the need to fly into a fight. Loz loses his bike and has to double up with Yazoo. Reno and her husband flirt a bit and then blow Yazoo’s motorcycle up (but not Yazoo and Loz, they make it out).

Cloud catches up to Kadaj and there’s some fighting before she loses track of Kadaj. Cloud reveals her arm has the disease from the beginning of the movie, which was why it was hidden all this time. Kadaj goes to Cloud’s church, ‘cause you know no one would ever look for her there. Cloud goes there too and finds her weeping over Mum, whose box has been shot, which means that Mum’s gonna be defrosted and dead. Kadaj flees when Cloud’s old girlfriend, now the all-powerful Earth mother, shows up and heals Cloud of her disease. Cloud pursues. They fight. Cloud’s buddies show up in an airship, but, because it’s her battle, they don’t fight, just watch. Yuffie doesn’t understand why, and Cid tells her it’s a man thing. Not realising that Cloud is a lesbian denying the existence of her boobs, Barret is confused by this information.

Kadaj absorbs Mum’s head, which changes her into Sephiroth. Now, Sephiroth has a grudge against Cloud because she wanted to have the place of Cloud’s girlfriend; she wanted to become the immortal Earth spirit. So they fight about it. A lot. Matrix-style with swords, in a giant storm… lots of Reloaded and Revolutions vibes here. Turns out that Cloud wins, and Sephiroth changes back into Kadaj, who dies in Cloud’s arms on top of the tallest tower in the city. There’s a curiously un-wetting downpour, during which Cloud is shot by Loz and Yazoo, and then blown up. But Loz and Yazoo die because the effort of climbing up to Cloud on the skyscraper was too much for them after being blown up by Reno and Rude.

Cloud’s dead now, and floating in white limbo. She gets sent back to the land of the living by her old girlfriend, whom she now thinks is her Mum. Everything goes back to being fine and dandy again. The city is a little more ruined but that’s okay since it was partially destroyed to begin with. Cloud agrees to not distance herself from her friends, and then does this baptismal thing with diseased peeps to restore them to normal. The End.

And that’s Final Fantasy: Advent Children for you. Okay, yes, as you can tell, I got about zero of the plot. But it was pretty to watch all the girls fighting. And the music was beautiful. It’s an excellent movie if you turn your brain off.

Baja California

2007-03-30T17:51:00.000-07:00

The Beginning
I live again! Yes, I am back to blogging after my month-long hiatus. Because I know everyone is absolutely dying to hear about my trip to Mexico, I’ve chosen it as the subject of this blog. All right, then, here we go. It was a dark and stormy night…

…erm, the bright and sunny Saturday morning of March the 24th at 9 o’clock when I set out for the state of Baja California, in Mexico, with my two sisters. Our chosen mode of transportation was my brother-in-law’s extremely nice Toyota Rav4, which he was so generous as to lend us for the week. We packed it with our stuff and Anubis, the protector-dog belonging to my older sister Rebecca, and set out. We crossed the US-Mexican border without even being stopped, which has happened both of the other times I’ve visited Mexico, too.

Once inside Mexico we tried to make it to El Rosario so that we could stay at Mama Espinoza’s, a hotel that Rebecca was familiar with and highly recommended. We took a side detour to visit La Bufadora. Here I got my first pictures of the trip.

La Bufadora is a marine geyser, and is much more impressive in life than in my pictures. It shoots, many people said, up to eighty feet high. I think it goes higher; it certainly looks much higher than that. There’s a legend about it: a baby whale swam into the cave at the base of it and then grew too fast and got stuck in there. The spout is the breath from its blowhole, and the roar of La Bufadora is the sound of its cry. Ickle baby whale, poor thing.

The channel and the geyser, the geyser spouting, more spouting, the runoff during a lull, a particularly high spout, and two more pictures for good measure: one and two.

Along the way to La Bufadora the walk is lined with shops selling all sorts of stuff. Rebecca bought me a bag from here. It says that it’s Gucci, and purports to be made in Italy, but it’s manifestly not. I know this because what is actually stamped in the side is “GUCCI, mede in italy”. I nearly laughed myself to death. I also bought some fake Chanel sunglasses there, because they were nice, except that the brand-stamping was shoddy, so I’ve taken off the marks so that no one can tell they were supposed to be Chanel. Perfectly usable now.

After this detour, we continued on to El Rosario, where we attempted to stay at Mama Espinoza’s. It was full, so we got directed to another place, the Cactus Hotel. Upon seeing the gigantic room we got, plus the very cool arrangement of it and the utter cleanliness of the place, Rebecca pronounced it to be far superior to Mama Espinoza’s.

Also in El Rosario is a little convenience store, Danny’s Espinoza Market, run by a man called Mishael Espinoza. If ever anyone who reads this happens to be in El Rosario, this is the place to buy your stuff. Not because it’s such a very great store, but because of Mishael. More on him later.

Guerrero Negro
On our second day we went down about 350 kilometres more, to the town of Guerrero Negro, which actually saw us leaving the state of Baja California and entering Baja California Sur. Guerrero Negro is a very orderly town, very flat, and very spread out. We stayed in a hotel that at first we thought was very nice. We went along in this happy delusion until the next morning, when we showered and spotted fleas jumping about on the white tiles of the shower. This unwaggy discovery incited us to think that if there were fleas in the shower where we could see them, there very likely were also fleas on the dark carpet where we could not see them. We vacated the premises as soon thereafter as possible. We do not seem to have picked up fleas, so I guess we suffered no harm after all.

There were quite a few interesting features about Guerrero Negro. There is a huge salt processing facility; we actually traveled through it on the way to the whale-watching boat. The salt water is spread out into huge lagoons, which are then allowed to dry. The salt crusts in piles and is then gathered, and seems to be stored in this one gigantic pile. I actually saw bulldozers traveling up it; the pile was about twenty-five times the height of one bulldozer, and many more times as wide and long. I also saw huge sea-barges piled with the stuff.

There are osprey breeding-platforms dotting this area; it has something to do with a conservation effort because of too many osprey eggs breaking because the shells were too thin, a result of overuse of pesticides. I didn’t quite understand the guide on that bit (his English was not the best, and my Spanish is the worst). In Guerrero Negro proper, however, the wildlife consists mainly of dogs. They run everywhere and do not belong to anyone. They flinch away from people at the slightest sharp movement, leading me to believe that they probably get hit quite often. I got a picture of three of them on the roof of a store. I have no idea how they got up there (plus I’ve never seen such a thing in the US) so I took a picture.

Roof Dogs.

Then there were also seals, which we saw on the end of the whale-watching tour. They were quite funny; the men were sticking their noses up in the air, and the less fat one was honking, and the ladies were just flopping about totally ignoring them. We went past some very sandy beaches, piled high with dunes and very desolate indeed, on the tour, which I liked so much that I got pictures of as well. I would have loved to have been able to stop and walk on them, but, sadly, the boat didn’t stop. The picture quality is less sometimes because these pictures were taken from a boat going about forty to fifty kilometers an hour, bumping over the waves.

The seals, proud males and bored females, and one lady notices. The empty sand beaches are as follows: one, two, and three.

And then there was the actual whale-watching tour. It was fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. The boat went out to a very wide bay/lagoon, where grey whales give birth and prepare the babies to go into the open ocean. We got surrounded by them and saw all of the things of a stereotypical whale-watching tour; the breathing, breaching, skyhopping, &c. And all three of us got to touch a baby whale! And his/her mama, too! They feel exactly like wet rubber, except for the barnacles, which are scratchy. The mums were worried about letting the babies near at first, but they loosened up after a while; either that or the babies became more disobedient. We saw one mom shove her baby away when he got too close. That pair went away after that.

All told we probably saw about forty-fifty whales that were distinguishably different (there might have been more, I just couldn’t tell since they weren’t all up at the same time, and I have a limited memory for distinguishing marks). There was one whale that scratched himself or herself on the bottom of our boat; it made the whole thing shake. That actually happened each time a whale was on one side of the boat close enough to touch; the boat shivers and then sinks on that side. Not enough to capsize it or anything, but that’s how you tell when a whale is there. I actually have no idea why it happens. I’ll have to look into the physics of large masses underneath small boats sometime.

The first whale we saw.
I took the picture out of excitement at actually seeing a whale, figuring that I wouldn’t get to see too many more (as happened on my last whale-watching trip, when I was 13). How wrong I was…

The first mother and baby.
Whale with tail visible.
A mother whale, very barnacled.
That mother’s curious baby.
The mother warning him off.
The baby coming back anyway.
That’s Rebecca about to touch the baby.

The mother checking us out.
That’s Jessica about to touch her.

Contact photo!
Jessica actually touching a grey whale! Woot! It was so cool, I touched that one too! And her baby! Whales whales whales! Whee!

Mulegé
Then on the next day we drove from Guerrero Negro to Mulegé. It’s a tiny little town, very peaceful, with the friendliest people imaginable. We actually stayed about ten miles outside of town, on this little protrusion of land aptly named the Point of Dreams (in Spanish of course, but I can’t remember how to spell it correctly). We stayed in a little bungalow we rented, for two days. And we swam, and snorkeled, and it was the most relaxing thing I have ever done, I think. Jessica, my younger sister, found an otter skull, and a starfish, and was the one to spot the first stingray. She kept the skull, but we had to put the starfish back because it turned out to be alive. I haven’t really got much to say about Mulegé except that the two days we spent there were my favourite of the trip.

The sunrise at our private stretch of beach, which came with the bungalow when we rented it, and a scenic wave, also taken at sunrise.

Driving
Then we drove back, and it was pretty much just retracing our steps back, except that we went straight from Mulegé to El Rosario, without stopping in Guerrero Negro. Along the way I took some pictures of various things that interested me.

Drug lord house.
This was a house in an entire neighborhood of houses belonging to drug lords. The construction on some of them is straight from the realm of the fantastic. There was one that was done with minarets, and a yellow castle—with turrets—not far from it, and a bunch done in what I shall term “cinderblock style”, which looks a lot like a prison only with windows. I even saw one shaped like a naked woman’s chest and face. Yes, really, complete with flesh-coloured paint and erect nipples; it was probably forty feet high, set on a hillside. I would have got a picture except that we were going down the highway at 140 kilometres an hour and there was no access ramp to turn back on. It was the single most amusing and pathetic house I’ve ever seen.

Pretty desert.
Pretty cacti.
A flower farm.
A forest of palms.
Vista one.
Vista two.

Military checkpoint.
We also went through eight military checkpoints, four each way, and were stopped six times and inspected five. This is one we got stopped at and asked a bunch of questions, but not actually made to get out of the vehicle and searched. It was kind of amusing to watch them searching our car very assiduously for smuggled drugs. They even opened the hood to check once, but they left most of our stuff alone, not pawing through our belongings.

A cow.
This animal is, as you can see, a cow. It was standing about a foot off the side of the main highway, without any kind of barrier between it and the road.

Cow bones.
And not too much further on we observed these bones, which leads me to think that sometimes the cows get hit when they wander about like that.

We started watching for bones after that, and found at least twenty that we considered worth going to look at. The reason we were looking at them is because we had by this time come upon a desire to possess some desert-bleached skulls, the stereotypical sort you see in movies and suchlike. And we did in fact collect a skull for each of us. Rebecca got the most fantastic cow skull ever (I’ll try an obtain a picture for a later post), Jessica got a somewhat less fantastic but still impressive cow skull (because she already had the otter skull), and I got a horse skull. My skull has a bullet-hole between the eyes; the poor baby was shot and then left in the desert to rot away and get bleached.

The cow skull front, the cow skull from the side, my horse skull from the front, horse skull from the side, and a close-up of the bullet hole.

Pay it Forward
And then on the drive back, one other extra-special thing happened. We ran out of gas on the way from Mulegé to El Rosario, because we forgot to fill the tank in Guerrero Negro, which is the last place with gas before El Rosario. El Rosario is about 350 kilometres from Guerrero Negro, as previously mentioned, and we left Guerrero Negro with half a tank. We were, upon reflection, perhaps carelessly forgetful.

Then, naturally, we were not wagged when we ran out of gas about 15 kilometres from El Rosario. We were having a collective “oh shit” moment, because for three gringas in Mexico, two of whom do not speak Spanish, running out of gas is definitely not a safe thing. Especially at night, which was due in one half hour.

And then the amazing part happened. Jess and I pushed the Rav4 off the road onto a pullout, and there happened to be a pickup hauling a boat parked some ways ahead on the same pullout. Immediately after we got the car off the road, a van pulled in behind us, carrying a man by the name of Mishael Espinoza (related to Mama Espinoza of El Rosario, charity must run in the family) and his friend. These two gentlemen offered to take Rebecca into town to get gas to bring back for the car, and the hubbub of people around the car attracted the attention of the gentleman who owned the boat. He came up to see what all the fuss was, and when he found out, said that he had a can of spare gas with him that we could use.

This gentleman was probably between fifty and sixty, and was a visitor to Baja from Wyoming. And his only requirement for giving us his gas and pulling us out of our tight spot was that we pass it on ten times. I’ve watched the movie Pay it Forward, but I’ve never seen anything in real life remotely like that before now.

So then Mishael followed us into town, to the Pemex station, and made sure we were all right before leaving. It was really the most extraordinary resolution to a potentially catastrophic disaster ever.

That’s the basic rundown on our trip to Mexico. I could elaborate more, but this is long enough, I think. Adios, until next time.

Ceramics

2007-02-28T15:58:00.000-08:00

I’m a substitute teacher (and student and wannabe writer). About a year ago, I subbed for Mr P, the ceramics teacher at a school in my district. I had lots and lots of spare time on my hands, so during one period, I made a little statuette. It was of a generic ancient Egyptian woman, standing about eight or nine inches tall. I made it from clay and I tried to mimic the look of ancient Egyptian statues. Not sure how well I succeeded, but you can judge for yourself.

The statue: Left Side, Right Side, Front, and Closeup.

I left the statue as wet clay on the top of the odds-and-ends box (that’s what I made it from) so that Mr P could reuse the clay in his class.

Today, I subbed for Mr P again, and the very first thing after “Hi” that he said to me when I walked in his door was, “Oh, you’ve subbed for me before! You made that little statue… I still have it, if you want it.” And he gave it to me. He’d fired it and everything, and he remembered that I made it, even though he hadn’t seen me in a year!

I feel special.

My Sister In Kenya

2007-02-04T00:56:00.000-08:00

My older sister, Rebecca, recently went to Nairobi, Kenya for the World Social Forum; she was funded by her university department as part of a research group. They paid for the ticket, room, and board while she was there. She decided, along with the other graduate students going, that since tickets to Africa, not to mention time off work and school, are hard to come by, they would go early and have a bit of a safari trip as well. So they arranged it; cheap safari, since they only had to pay for hotels for the extra week and the transportation and suchlike. These are the marvelous pictures (plus some of the stories) that came back from that part of the trip.

First of all, the pictures with my sister in them:
The Group.
This is part of the university group in Nairobi. My sister is the blonde one in the approximate center. The older gentleman beside her is Dr. Chase-Dunn, her advising professor. The little one in the very bright green shoes is a boy who tagged along. He used to be barefoot, but my sister bought him the shoes—he picked them himself.

The Hospital.
Actually my sister isn’t in this picture, but since we’re on the subject of Nairobi; this is a hospital signboard in the city. The circumcision listed as a service offered refers to female genital mutilation.

The Escort.
My sister is the blond one. The gentleman beside her is the escort mentioned in the sign; yes, he really did have to carry that gun the whole time.

The Camel Ride.
The very tall camel which my sister rode She got up there and then got scared. The gentlemen with her are from the Samburu area, and the one in the red lied about his fraterity to the chairperson of Umoja. More on Umoja in a few posts.

The Monkey.
My sister posing with a very cute monkey that is quite at ease with people. Note the sign above her head; it says “Please do not feed Monkeys.” She ignored this very good advice, and fed it part of a Power Bar. As a result, it wouldn’t leave her alone, and it got into her hotel room. It searched around until it found another Power Bar, which it stole. She saw it outside eating it and decided to get revenge on it.

The Sad Monkey.
She placed a bunch of bananas inside the window, and teased the poor creature.

Next, the scenery pictures:
The sun, shining through the Kenyan jungle.

A beautiful sunset.

A second beautiful sunset.

And finally, the animal pictures:
The Trashers.
These charming fellows were photographed outside her cabin on the safari. She came out of the cabin eating a Power Bar (this was before the monkey in the above photos) and got ambushed by one that leapt upon her and fastened itself to her leg. She got scared it would bite her and threw a piece of the Power Bar away from her to get it to leave. It did, but a number of its buddies gathered around, and chased her into a friend’s cabin. The later she went back to her cabin to find it totally trashed. She had closed the door but not locked it, and the monkeys had broken in. They did not find her Power Bars but did find all her papers, clothes, makeup, and sundry items. They bit her toothpaste tube open, and left some lovely gifts in the sink and on the bed to show their appreciation of it.

Demon Crocodiles.
The Demon Crocodiles of Kenya. These fellows had their picture taken at night, hence the flash glow and the demonification. My sister was behind a low wall, which was built around the entire safari hotel with the idea of keeping these guys out.

A Black Mamba.

Cheetahs.

Fighting Rhinos.
A very nice picture of fighting rhinos. They watched them for about fifteen minutes. The one with the broken horn seemed to be winning, or at least pushing the other one around more. It was not fast clashing together, but more of a sort of game of chicken.

A Dikdik.
A weeny little antelope.

An Elephant.

A Baby Elephant.
This little guy was with his mother. The safari group thought he was darn cute.

Charging Baby Elephant.
Until he charged the safari van. That was when they moved on from elephant-watching.

A Giraffe.

Zebras.
The one lying down is not ill, just lazy. While my sister was watching it, it raised the upper hind leg, as if doing a leg lift, and let out a giant fart. That was when they moved on from zebra-watching.

Lions.

A Leopard.
This one followed the safari van for a bit before giving up on the idea of free food.

Hippos.
She got about twenty feet from them, because the boat driver didn’t know they were there until then.

And that’s all, folks, until next time.

Intro Post

2007-01-30T12:18:00.000-08:00

I went online today, was bored, and decided to start a blog. Now that I have one, I find I have very little to say. I expect that I'll eventually use this particular bit of web-space for something. I might gush about people I know or wish I knew, advertise for things I like, rant about things I find stupid or don't like, or any of the other things that people use blogs for. But not today. Unless I find later that I simply must say something.