in the name of my academic career, i am not going to be using MSN except during my boring class on Monday and Wednesdays and from work when i am on the researcher computer. Yes, this means i will be anti-social. Tough titties. If you want to talk to me, send me an email. You will know i am still alive from my semi-frequent blog posting. This has gone on long enough and i am going to end up not handing in my final assignments at this rate. I realized this evening that i am no more than 50 pages of reading further than i was last time i went in for an honours thesis class and nowhere further on either of my two other big papers (Luther and Proust). This means it’s time to crackdown and i am going to follow the advice of the one man who i know will be senile or dead before he consciously lets me down.

I forgot a coursepack at home today and had to rush back between 4pm and 6pm to pick it up. I now have a CV to correct for a summer-job colleague of mine. Then i have three articles to read and summarize, 50 pages of primary source readings for Russian history, an article for my 490 paper and call numbers for my Luther paper to look up - right….and i need to finish Boccaccio’s Defense of Poetry (another 200 pages). All this SHOULD be done for tonight. It will not be, because i require sleep to go to work tomorrow for nine, but i must get cracking…

oh, and for $50, i agreed to drive the van permitting a first-year LACer to move tomorrow evening. Money in the bank permits not working next semester…and i am going to need the time to catch up it looks like…when will i make it to get my new student access card for the bus and metro? There is not enough time in a day?

i love the LAC. i would never dress like that normally and be comfortable. usually i would spend the whole night worried about how slutty i looked, but even when i felt uncomfortable, i felt comfortable because i love the folk, and knew which folk to avoid for their shadiness.

it was a great party even if they did run out of beer and sausage. i should be reading Faulkner right now before my grandmother gets here. My Dad’s uncle died yesterday morning…it’s going to be a long dinner.

i like being able to post stuff based on my not-so extensive readings rather than random, “what i did today” journaly junk. I remember where and when i wrote the stuff, so it serves the same archival purpose for me…but i hope it’s a little less boring for you…or at least a nice change.

On that note, i was reading about the Schism for my Renaissance/Reformation class (the only i always post from, complaining about how bored i am?). This nugget was skimmed from our textbook:On the Anabaptist movement (those following ALL Christ’s commandments, and literally): [they] persuaded credulous women that it was impossible for them to be saved without sacrificing their virtue, for, they argued, the Lord said that only he who was willing to part with all he held most dear would enter into the kingdom of Heaven (Rice and Grafton, The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460-1559, 167).

To further the “men are pigs” theme, i am going to tack on one of my father’s favourite sayings: “Rule number one when attempting to determine the motivation for male’s behaviour - men are pigs. Rule number two, if in doubt, see rule number one.” This is not a shot at anyone in particular, but sometimes it’s nice to be reminded of the simplest truths in life.

And, lastly, i have an article from the National Post on Monday that discusses the sexiness of various colours and what they connotate. Yes, i know, this is boring, but i don’t feel like writing it all out to mock; i would much rather engage in a more reader-interactive post based on the information in this article that might even be humourous: so, what’s your favourite colour? Mine is orange…wait, purple, no…orange. Yes, orange. I’ll come up with something that at least i’ll find amusing if you’ll humour me…so pls participate for kicks. If not, then you’re just a party-pooper. Hopefully, this will prove we are all pigs, not just those of us con phallis (masc.pl. abl. of accompaniment).

Why am i in a good mood? A Professor of mine told me i got the first A+ she has ever awarded on that film review of 19 fevrier 1839 i was posting about earlier this month. I might just post it for you all to bask in my glory when i have no new material…but i don’t think that will be very soon…the stickies on my desktop are overwhelming me with interesting topics to investigate. Where was all this creative energy when i had the time to devote my evenings to posting?

I discovered last night a very horrifying fact:

The difference between a person of my height and activity level (at 22 years old) weighing 120lbs and 140lbs is 130 calories a day…That’s a little more than half a bagel.

I cut all my bagels in half.

Decided that one of the best ways to test out the slow-cooker would be to make Hungarian stew. The world is apparently engaged in a conspiracy against the lima bean. My recipe calls for a package of frozen lima beans, but lima beans could not be found in frozen, canned nor dried form. I actually like lima beans. Hopefully my stew will come out fine nonetheless.

Guillaume and i went for Korean BBQ last night. My chopstick skills, acquired at the same place with chicken teriyaki last Thursday, disappeared and i made an oaf of myself…me? grace? since when? I am a female Gargantua (and yes, i am counting calories again…trying to average 1200/day over a week…made egg salad for sandwiches). This whole travelling by metro and metro-good-bye thing is not working for me…to public…too jerky…i never realized how much of my social composure was/is car-based.

Lastly, that paper i HATED writing and HATED having to had in: solely confirmed my utmost fears that everyone else is stupid. I got an A. An A at McGill is the highest mark they give out…this is a shitty paper…i am going to try and get another Prof., at the LAC, to mark it blind to get a true assessment of the damage before i write a research paper from it…due in 3 weeks.

Ok. i finished one novel tonight, still have readings to do for tomorrow.

Found during my readings of Elliot’s Wasteland (off sparksnotes):

A sign of the pessimism with which Eliot approaches his subject is the poem’s epigraph, taken from the Satyricon, in which the Sibyl (a woman with prophetic powers who ages but never dies) looks at the future and proclaims that she only wants to die. The Sibyl’s predicament mirrors what Eliot sees as his own: He lives in a culture that has decayed and withered but will not expire.

I’ve read and translated quite a bit of the Satyricon though and never encountered her…more things i wish i had time to go back and look it up.

i decided to drive to Ste. Anne des Plaines to go down memory lane…and yes, i drove by his house…and Alex’s. He called me after i got home; he had been out having dinner with a tiger that eats out of your hand. My grandmother says i need to let him go…i do.

when i was reading for classes rather than attending a broadway show…

from Mrs. Dalloway page 79 of the Harcourt edition:

“Everyone, if they were honest, would say the same; one doesn’t want people after fifty; one doesn’t want to go on telling women they are pretty.”

Not only do i love the meaning of the above phrase, it’s a great example of Virginia Woolf’s use of the semi-colon. The connectedness of the thoughts really wouldn’t be apparent without it.

I tremble at the thought that, perhaps, it makes more sense to define me in terms of the objects rather than the relationships i’ve acquired; the former being not only less transient but also more of an invested choice of acquisition. When did i become a materialist? When did i stop caring about caring?

Wow. I hate this paper. I am honestly dreading remitting it in …. Five seconds; and done. Proof that I’m setting myself up to fall flat on my face: this paper is overly dependent on direct quotations from the secondary sources – I was unable to seamlessly integrate the thoughts together into coherent paragraphs. If there are other good students in this class, I am doomed. Today I don’t feel like writing an honours thesis, going to grad school or even finishing this four-year B.A. If I become a schoolteacher, it will inevitably be a bitter, washed-up one. I dreamt I was being berated by Sharon Nadeau, a girl one year older than I who was on the same bus for all of elementary and high school for missing the point entirely and over-simplifying the research. Just once, I would like to be able to do more than just skim indexes for references to my subject and actually read a complete publication.

I have an appointment to meet Prof. Gittes Thursday morning and we’re supposed to look at the corpus of correspondence he has in his home that might be relevant to my tentative research topic. I am about four weeks behind already and I haven’t even asked him to be my thesis supervisor yet…I was also supposed to plan out this week-end with Tim, but that’s not done either…thank god I left the sleeping pills at home (with my watch).

My apartment’s a mess. I didn’t make my bed this morning because I was busy folding the laundry in the dryer. Said laundry is sitting in a hamper on my bed. There is a tub of dirty dishes from my making of today’s lunch as well as the clean ones I washed yesterday piled in the drying rack. I forgot to put out the trash. I only slept six hours, and I find I’m better off to only sleep four if you can’t make it to seven. I may just take a nap in the library instead of actually doing my homework.

People have been hounding me on MSN. I know I’m online all the time, but if I’m not talking to you it’s because I am very busy and not feeling so great rather than my being mad or anti-social.

brought the wrong books in to school. i have a ton to do, but now i have dead time. it’s driving me crazy. i hate going to class without my readings done let alone without my textbook. i only have this class once every three weeks…i am a dumbass.