life in the subjunctive mode

It's been a while. I'm still trying to make sense of life, because I thought I had a handle on what I wanted to do, and then I went away to field school for six weeks, met a whole bunch of new people, cleaned skeletons, and reevaluated my life. I've got a couple new ideas floating around in my head, and they're all pretty awesome options, but I can't really do much with all of the new thoughts until I get back to school and incorporate that into my new plans as well.

Will type up more later. Right now, I'm busy organizing music in order to avoid doing laundry and organizing the clusterfuck that is my room after two rounds of unpacking (from school, and from San Jose de Moro) without any cleanup. I also, at some point, want to put together a SJM playlist, because that's how I do nostalgia.

Schedule
January 20th: Author & Artist Sign Ups Open
March 1st: Reminder Artist Sign Ups
March 20th: Check-In #1
April 25th: Author Sign Ups close + Rough Drafts Due
April 27th: Artist Claiming!
May 30th: Author & Artist Check In #2
June 15th: Check-In #3
June 30th: Final Draft Posting

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I found out at the last minute that AU_bigbang isn't doing a fourth round this year because people were jerks (which, why? Why do people do?) so I signed up for heroinebigbang over on LiveJournal instead. It's basically the same format/length, with a much shorter timeframe. So ... I will still be writing stupid amounts, but I'll be able to get it done before I go to Peru! Yay! (Although I might need to talk to the mod about that, depending ... I have no idea what my schedule will be like in Peru, so it's best to get everything done before then, but the posting date is only a couple of days after I arrive so who the hell knows what that will be like.)

Anyway, I'm still excited about this. I've got an outline and a couple of miscellaneous bits of story written, and have I mentioned that I'm excited? I am so excited to write a long story.

I'm also going to be ridiculously swamped with work unless I can get my shit together, so I'm trying to do that. I've been walking around in a sievelike haze for ages now. I got five and a half hours of sleep last night and woke up groggy, but once I was awake I could focus. I've been alert and eloquent and cheerful all day, and it's been great. I don't know whether or not to risk being completely incapacitated if I repeat the same thing -- as a general rule I tend to function exceptionally well the first night that I go with less than six hours of sleep, and then after that I'm a wreck ... but then again, that's a general rule and things have not been normal lately.

Gah. I just made it through the Waterloo Digression.

I cannot get over how gorgeous Hugo's prose is. Gorgeous and expressive. He's got this great mix of poetic shape and movement; for all the excesses and divergences and straight-up author tracts, the story still manages to move. It moves, and I can get a good sense of the characters through their actions, not just through his biographies. This is BIG NEWS, you understand, because I'm terrible at figuring out characters, and I'm even worse at making character judgments in 19th century novels, so I credit this to Hugo. There's something about his writing that's very lively despite the stylistic flourishes.

In other news, I spent four hours putting yarn and crochet thread into balls, and I have not spoken aloud to anyone at all today.

I had a nice day today, doing work and then watching far too much television (teetering on the precipice of an obsession with Buffy the Vampire Slayer that I will delay until after finals are over, and also grossly invested in The War Games which is ten twenty-four minute serials long, something I didn't realize when I started watching it, and by then it was too late. I'm loving Zoe so far - actually, I'm loving every single character in the story so far, including Random Scottish Redcoat. I'll have to space it out over the course of the next few days) and I also bought double-pointed size-0 needles so I can knit some of the things over at MochiMochiLand. The two old ladies over at the Stitching Post, who were very nice and thought I was a girl, thankfully managed to talk me out of the 9" long 000 needles. They'd have been the right size for crochet thread, but would have gotten unwieldy for an 18-stitch project.

My housemates invited me to go to an ugly-sweater party with them, but I went to a potluck last night, I don't own any sweaters, and I really need to work on my Yuletide. Also on my final paper, but, you know, who the fuck cares about that?

I also keep spazzing because it feels like Sunday, and I'm thinking "holy shit I've got to get all of this done in the next three days" but I have three days before my stupid-story edit is due, four before my Anthropology final, and five before my Hamlet/Segismundo essay and Yuletide are both due. So I do have some time.

Not going to lie, I'm ridiculously excited about this essay. It's a bitch to write, and I keep having to change my thesis because I keep re-analyzing -- I'm doing a comparison of Hamlet's "to be or not to be" monologue, and comparing it to Segismundo's "todos suenan lo que son" -- the speeches in different contexts, trying to figure out which one is the best angle from which to approach. I had my breakthrough while sitting in the public library.

(Also while at the library, this woman came in with her little girl. The little girl was like "anohito ...?" and I freaked because whenever little kids say something like "look at that person" etc then I assume they're going to comment on me ... only to see her run straight up to this long-haired dude in a chair near mind, stare at him for a moment, and then run back to her mom, pointing at him. "Nagai," she informed her, and then something else I didn't understand. It was interesting, because I remembered what my Japanese professor said, about how she wasn't able to speak in complete sentences until she was two years old. This girl was probably two or three, and she was speaking in fragments, but the fact that she was still perfectly clear is sort of ... I mean, it's true of little kids in any language, but in this instance it was interesting because a whole lot of the grammar we learned this semester in Japanese was about not-saying. Japanese people say a lot by what parts of sentences they leave out, and how they lead up to silences, and et cetera.

I need to be writing essay, not blog post. Enough.

Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii got my Yuletide assignment! This is very exciting. I have never done this before, but I'm super-pleased with it and I have a fountain of ideas.

( morbid humor and casual mentions of suicide below )

I'm workshopping my short story next Thursday! Great!

... I've only written a page and a half so far.
( grumble grumble grumble )

Work! Final papers, not-final papers, presentations, etc.

This paper on nomadic metaphysics in the student union is the biggest piece of bullshit I have ever written. It's also interesting, so that's okay.

I'm just going to live off of Sweet Tarts and M&Ms tonight. That's it. Maybe I'll go get proper food in a hour or two. I am going to refrain from buying more of those gigantic bags of on-sale Easter candy, no matter how tempting it might be. I always plan to stretch them out, and just have them whenever I'm in the mood, but then I scarf them down in three days.

Also writing a scene with Taran complaining to Neirin that no one understands their relationship, because sometimes I don't, either.

(11:18) How do you quote something that you found pre-quoted, when the original source is, say, a booklet published at the beginning of the twelfth century that is currently out of print? (I'm using it to support the idea that I'm not reading too much into the stories in the bestiary, and that these were conscious decisions on the part of the compilers.) I copied down the citation that the author of that article used, but I have no idea what it means except that it looks like the citations that my professor wants me to request permission to use for her book, so I'm hesitant to just copy and paste.

(11:32) This girl is going to be in my Medieval Tourism class with the same professor next semester. I feel like we're going to have to become friends just because we've had at least one class together every semester so far.

(11:34) Medieval people were incredibly presumptuous, by the way. It makes me irritated and then I have to take deep breaths and remember that this is all happening 900 years into the past, and people now are not going to judge me because my ancestors believed that all of nature is obviously put there just to be a big honking allegory.

(11:42) I am citing a book called 'How To Preach A Sermon'. I really am.

(11:47) I'm hearing weird cell-phone-like vibrations from various places in my room. I don't remember there being cell-phones-on-vibration - oh, never mind, I'm not hallucinating, my computer speakers just aren't good enough quality to process really low trumpets. That's reassuring.

(11:56) My brain is dead. Good night, sweet world, and send flocks of angels to sing me to my rest.

This was just the last hour. I was working on this thing for about six hours during the day.

Apparently pelican children sometimes have seizures just before or after their parents feed them. This is both weirdly fascinating, and relevant to my essay.

EDIT: There is this, that I've been so busy working on this essay and stressing out about this essay that I largely forgot about my Fiction Writing class critique on Tuesday until I got an email from a girl in my class telling me that she really liked it.

So there is that. *pleased* *still going to freak out and possibly be sick until I actually get my story over with* Such is life. But that was very, very encouraging.

It's snowing, which given that I'm in the middle of New York State is not all that strange. There's just a lot of people here from downstate who are like 'SNOOOOOOOOOOOOW NOOOOOOOOOOOOO' and I'm like, 'Dudes, you made the choice to come to this school, now deal.'

But more importantly, I had my dialogue read - the one between Neil and Jack - and everything went better than expected. The two guys who read it did a good job, although I failed to project my voice when reading the narration as usual, and people laughed. They laughed at two points which were supposed to be funny, and I am sort of ridiculously proud of myself for being able to be funny which is not something I'm known for outside of my immediate family. I sort of fudged it when the professor asked about the characters, I said they're living together, because I was in a fuzzy anxious haze and felt stupid. Then immediately after felt stupid for not representing. But whatever, people liked it. The problem I have is that no one ever seems to have any comments on what I write. Like, with other people, they'll say, 'I liked this part, and this image' or 'This part felt unrealistic, maybe you should do this' but I don't really get anything from the other people in the class. It's just the professor. I don't know if this is good or bad.

They're probably so overawed by my writing skills that their brains are stunned into silence.

Yeah, that's it.

My professor did say that I do a very good job of creating a sense of a fully developed world in which the characters live, so that's definitely a good thing.

It's the first snow of the year and I'm sitting in my window seat and the sky is grey and the trees are all desaturated browns with bright green moss and my room is warm for once and YES this is nice.