Drowning Nor Waving

I have an e-mail in my inbox from my alma mater (hey, I can say that now! Look, I graduated from a place!) that tells me: "Get your resume-worthy alumni e-mail account."

You now belong to an impressive inner circle of U of T alumni. And with that hard-earned diploma comes a helping hand from your Alma Mater.

The perks begin with an alumni email account, as in "your.name@alumni.utoronto.ca." It's a resumé-worthy email that says, "Hey, future boss, I graduated from one of the world's top universities."

It is accompanied by a banner ad that shows various early twentysomething people being slackery, long-haired, and iPod-listening next to e-mails like carbzilla2000@yahoo.com or frothymuskrat@hotmail.com, and then they get all cleaned up and professional and corporate with their alumni e-mail.

(I admit I'm a little offended that my World's Top University thinks I spent all that time there so I could job-hunt -- a month after my convocation, which means five months after classes let out, so I don't know whose thumb I'm supposed to have been sitting on for five months -- with boobies@hotmail.com. But this is not that post. This is the post where I'm smug.)

So now I have a terrible temptation to write them back and be like "Oh, think that's professional and attention-getting and forward-thinking? How about [WORK E-MAIL]?"

I never said I was always good. :D

June 30, 2008 Progress Notes:

Above

Words today: 2500.
Words total: 60,500 MS Word, 73,250 SMF.

73,250 / 85,000 (86.2%)

Reason for stopping: Quota. Or knowing I'm not getting to 3k tonight.
Munchies: Bocconcini, cherries, and pears.

Darling du Jour: Jack is good and kind. Jack looks away and is quiet while I do my crying, and he doesn't say nothing about it from the time my voice goes down and my shoulders start to quiver from the time I get my breath back under rein again, swallow up the little gulps and wipe the tears and snot and sweat that comes from crying too hard off my face.

Words Matthew Won't Admit to Knowing: None tonight.
Mean Things: Shame. Finally getting some of the things people have been gently trying to pound through your head for months. More shame. And everyone, just everyone, being wrong.
Research Roundup: Exterior of Toronto General.
Books in progress: Charles Stross, Saturn's Children.
The glamour: A bean! I has it! Also, grocery shopping, other garden work besides gloating, and job-applying.

---

My graduation request is up on the university system. Although the summer marks aren't there yet, this gave me a little shiver of glee. I get to hit the button that says I'm out of here on Wednesday (as tomorrow is a statutory holiday, and buttons do not work on stats).

Today was quiet -- mostly recovering from the weekend, which encompassed two longish shifts at work and an awesome backyard barbeque yesterday afternoon, all in and around Pride Weekend. I didn't see much of Pride except the marketplace thing they do on Saturday (aka: the Dealer's Room), wherein I did not buy one (1) tee-shirt that said "Straight, Not Narrow" for lack of funds but did buy one (1) fresh-squeezed limeade. The best bit was probably Saturday morning, when I was walking down to College to get a streetcar to go to work (bus service gets wonky during the Pride Run), and passed a group of about fifteen runners of all genders wearing wedding dresses, shuffling mightily amidst the actual marathon-runners along Wellesley:

Runner 1: I'm tired.
Runner 2, adjusting veil: (acidly) All right, kids, are we doing this or not?

There was something just...peculiarly wonderful about that. :)

Now reading, and then shortly bed. Statutory holiday or not, I need to get a proper haircut and make stabs at finding some interview clothes tomorrow.

June 11, 2008 Progress Notes:

Above

Words today: 2000.
Words total: 46,500 MS Word, 57,500 SMF.

57,500 / 80,000 (71.9%)

Reason for stopping: 2am again, although I'm wide awake. The humidity this weekend entirely messed up my sleep schedule.
Liquid Refreshment: Water.
Munchies: Mangoes! Strawberries! Sheep's-milk cheese!

Darling du Jour: (They didn't know what to do with my kind back then, he'd say with a gentle smile, and I'd ask lion-foot people? and he'd laugh and laugh, his rich Papa laugh, and go no no, people from Punjab. Indian people, he'd say.
One place Above was much like another for me, especially when I was knee-high to my Papa and followed him everywhere except the dark Duty shifts Above. "Do they now?" I asked him once, and the smile went away and his eyes looked elsewhere. No, he said. They do not.
Papa sad was frightening. I didn't ask again.)

Words Matthew Won't Admit to Knowing: apprehensive, vestibule. He did kind of want the second one, but we could not make a case for him having it.
Mean Things: Knowing everybody lies about how bad things really were for your father, because it's your father. And the girl who's famous for doing runners not waiting until you get home. And all this after two pitched battles in one day.
Research Roundup: Top 100 girls' names 1960-1969, common Quebecois surnames, 1960s immigration patterns coming into Toronto, grandmother and grandfather in Hindi.
Books in progress: Textbooks. No time for much else right now.
The glamour: Today was reasonably busy for not leaving the house. Packed up a story to go out, edited an essay to go in, worked on the garden, worked on job application, and worked -- hardcore -- on the grant application due next week, as well as the usual bits and drabs of support mail and so forth. Writing was fairly soothing after all that.

---

I really shouldn't be working on this right now -- I should be working either on my grant application or on the Shakespeare essay that's also due Monday, which I have not done nearly enough work on. Part of the grant application, however, is a synopsis, and there's about 15-20k of this book where I don't know what happens.

It's right after this bit that I'm working on now.

I'm not sure if I was thinking maybe if I worded it'd tell me what happens? This did not work. But doing something was a lot happier than beating my head against the synopsis for an unfinished book some more.

After putting together the literary resume and sending out the first fifteen pages (they want fifteen pages) to a few people on a quick turnaround, though? I am actually feeling some serious confidence in myself and this book today. I forget sometimes that I have at least a little awesome to my name.

Tomorrow evening is Laurell K. Hamilton, answering questions and signing at the Merrill Collection. I'll be working that, so if you have the missing 15-20k of plot that I can put in my synopsis, please feel free to put it on the doorstep there. :p

Bed now. Hopefully to sleep, hopefully to dream.

"There are several bases upon which the fear of a loss of power can be linked specifically with gender. Biological theories of gender, wherein behavioural attributes derive directly from physical sex, held academic credence in Western society for centuries and persist in the popular consciousness."

O lord. I couldn't have put another buzzword in those sentences without upgrading to interrogate or dialectic, and they're in the paragraph before. La Belle Dame of Academese Sans Merci hath me in thrall.

Send trashy pulp novels! Send rescue dogs! :p

May 15, 2008 Progress Notes:

Above

Words today: 500.
Words total: 36,650 MS Word.
Reason for stopping: Not quite feeling it tonight. Besides, I was very good today and deserve an earlier night.
Liquid Refreshment: Water. And now some scotch.
Munchies: Chips and salsa, two pears, a mango, two peaches that weren't that good, and some nice cheese. Scrounge dinners are sometimes fun.

Darling du Jour: Eh. No darling. Said I wasn't feeling it.
Words Matthew Won't Admit to Knowing: vulnerable. Possibly because it was referring to him. ;)
Mean Things: One hundred years of Evil Asylum. And something by implication that again, is really foul if it's true. I need to think about it, though. I'm not sure if I'm getting to the point with some of the past history where I'm really laying it on a bit thick.
Research Roundup: The combustibility of dust. Upon which count the internet utterly failed me. Oh yes, it gave me a nice novel called "Fire and Dust" which is actually written by Jim Gardner, proving that the internet is really composed of maybe 500 player characters and the rest of you are NPCs, but nobody was saying anything on whether common household dust burned.

I ended up hunting myself a dustbunny and setting it on fire. Yes, in a controlled and fire-safe environment.

It didn't go whoosh.

I was kinda disappointed about that.

Books in progress: Jeffrey Ford, The Physiognomy, textbooks.
The glamour: Printing a story to go out for the first time since...December? (I've e-mailed all this year's subs so far), feeding of the shoggoth, class, gymming, banking, some garden fussing, the conquest of the stack of dishes that is no longer in my sink, support mail, and assorted whatnot.

---

Random hilarity from today: the Tuesday and Thursday class is The Short Story, with a professor I've already had and like, and today we did three from Edgar Allan Poe and two from Stephen King, one of which was The Mangler. In discussing the ongoing sort of...condemnation the story makes of mixing old forms with new -- exorcism with technology -- the professor came out with: "After all, I couldn't go up to the Pickering nuclear plant and sprinkle some holy water around and make it safer."

My immediate thought is, no, but that should work. Because it's too cool not to.

Rule #1 of the Universe According to Leah: all natural laws, including basic phsyics, can and should be trumped by AWESOME.

April 9, 2008 Progress Notes:

Above

Words today: 1000.
Words total: 29,000 MS Word.
Reason for stopping: I am getting sleeeepy. Dinner might help with this.
Liquid Refreshment: Water.
Munchies: Dried mango, two apples.

Darling du Jour: And that was the problem in the end, Corner and Atticus, bloodtouch hands and crab-claw arms and awkward, desperate loving. Not Corner nor Atticus was a soft-heart, rose-loving Beauty.
They were both claws and temper. They were both Beasts.

Words Matthew Won't Admit to Knowing: catatonic. Although he's okay with conciliator. Boy reads the wrong books.
Mean Things: Getting pitied. Shame in front of grownups. And in the write-forward, a very mundane kind of tragedy, more tragic for its mundanity.
Research Roundup: N/A.
Books in progress: Jim Munroe and Salgood Sam, Therefore, Repent!.
The glamour: Workshop work, library-fine paying, kitchen tidying, OWW crits. Today is actually ripe with glamour, but the good kind.

---

Today brought me one exam I did better on than I may have had any right to, one massage which fixed my left shoulder (which had seized up), two nice cheeses for breakfasts this week, a package of quail which is now marinating for my dinner, dried mango slices (at this point they too should get their own tag), some truly excellent news for/from a friend, words, and tee-shirt weather. I am sleepy and pleasantly content.

Today was also my last day of full-time classes. Ever.

Yeah, there's an essay to write (for Tuesday), a take-home exam (for the 21st), and then two more exams to write. But by and large? I survived the Death Semester, and looking over some of the stuff I got back this week, with some pretty damn good grades.

One credit to go to finish out this degree.

Leisurely 11am breakfasts commence tomorrow. :)

cristalia: There's a concept here in prosody called "eurythmicity".
cristalia: I think that should mean the concept of prosody done in the style of Annie Lennox.
cristalia: But it isn't. :-(
kafkonia: Eurythmic City?
stillsostrange: so, hot gender-fuck?
cristalia: (I wonder how you'd do genderfuck prosody...)
kafkonia: (Wear a pretend mustache?)
cristalia: (You can't wear mustaches in your prosody.)
matociquala: beards?
cristalia: (you'd have to talk with the speech rhythm of a mustache.)
kafkonia: (That's deep.)
cristalia: (or beard.)
matociquala: maybe the words could wear moustaches
cristalia: heeee
cristalia: and fake glasses.
kafkonia: That's Marxist prosody.
cristalia: Class critique!

The paper on acquisition of French stress patterns by English learners?

Sooo almost done. *g*

(And I want prosody! And I want prosody! And I want it so! it's an obsession!)

GOOD!

"Kryptonian International Remembrance Day", which is the poem I wrote after the Virginia Tech shootings, is live in the second issue of Oddlands Magazine. I normally wouldn't give the context for a poem like that, but it's pretty obvious.

Also, "Furnace Room Lullaby" is scheduled for the May 2nd issue of Pseudopod. 'Ware!

MEH!

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Not-#19 -- Joel Shepherd, Crossover

I got maybe a chapter into this last night and put it aside as a qualified Not For Me. Not because there was something therein that offended me, or made me sad, or was abominably terrible or mean, but...it's just slushy.

In 35 or so pages it manages to hit most of the major bases of stuck-in-slushpile writing, including a mirror scene, coyness with information, rampant word rep (the tic word is "attractive", up to four times in two sentences at one point), loose and scaffoldy writing, 25 pages worth of exposition and wandering around a setting not quite sure what to do (aka: stalling for time) before the plot even thinks about happening, two sex scenes, and that thing peculiar to male writers of female characters who are supposed to be highly sexual where...the character views herself as sexual but in a way a third-party male person would do it. I think this falls under a not-fully-developed ability to maintain and empathize with character PoV. However, it sort of comes across as the author wanting to do his character, but the words being fed through the character's brain and mouth.

That is creepy as shit, let me tell you.

Writers are hereby invited by me to stop it.

So...yes. Not-#19. It's just made of too much slush.

BLEH!

The paper doesn't have to be good, it just has to be handed in on time.
The paper doesn't have to be good, it just has to be handed in on time.
The paper doesn't have to be good, it just has to be handed in on time.
The paper doesn't have to be good, it just has to be handed in on time.
The paper doesn't have to be good, it just has to be handed in on time.
The paper doesn't have to be good, it just has to be--

I found my Go.

It was in the dried mango slices.

---

Dishes clean, produce and little granny cart for hauling groceries around bought, hair washed, and 500 words of essay on Eliot's Four Quartets to go before I can call it a night.

Remind me to never:

a) skip my vitamins
b) ingest caffeine
c) ingest foods high in white sugar
c.1) to the exception of real foods
c.2) for like a week
c.3) during the most important month of my semester
d) short myself on sleep
e) and all this on a few days where the ambient sunlight is really low

--ever again.

Idiot.

And to keep mango slices in the house.

I read the Oresteia this afternoon for the Classical Modes of Literature class. Aside from being a truly kickass bit of drama -- no, seriously, it's blood and rhetoric all the way down -- it contained the following line in The Eumenides:

Leader of the Furies (to Apollo): "Never try to cut my power with your logic."

Dudes. Adam Savage is a Fury. :D