this is not the post you're looking for

[jade_sabre]

Okay y'all for those of you who are interested I swear I am working on a post about last week. Really. It's coming. I just--have to work out how to word things. And try to determine how much kissing to talk about. (I love kissing. It is AWESOME. And now I miss it muchly.) (Here: tell me what y'all want to hear about, that will help.)

In the meantime, two things! One is a meme from redbrunja from a couple weeks back, in which I am supposed to post about five things and if you comment with a bang bang or something I'll ask you about five things and anyway, her five things for me were

1.) Favorite disney movie.
Sleeping Beauty! I mean, I love watching The Little Mermaid (it is one of the few movies I can watch in the background) and I enjoy Beauty and the Beast and The Emperor's New Groove makes me laugh SO HARD and Pocahontas is, for all its troubles, beautiful--but Sleeping Beauty is my favorite. It has everything! And if Tim Burton makes an adaptation of it I will die.

2.) Favorite romantic dynamic.
I do love Holly Golightly/Paul, Attolia/Eugenides, Tenar/Ged, Scarlett/Rhett--I like a certain amount of hardness or coldness in the girl and watching how the guy tries to get around it? While knowing the fact that the girl is just so afraid of being vulnerable (and usually the guy is too) and they have to work it out and there's anger and bitterness along the way and desperation and passion and--yeah. That.

(See also: A Room with a View.)

3.) Show/movie/book that you wish had a huge fandom.
Oh my goodness I don't know. It's a dangerous question because when tiny fandoms become middling become large, things change, and sometimes I like the tiny fandom for what it is.

Also I have not joined any new fandoms lately, so...idk. Usually I just wish there was better fanfic for things like my weird random Nickelodeon ships.

OH. OH. I WISH NWN2 HAD A LARGER FANDOM SO THAT MORE PEOPLE WOULD READ MY FICS. And love them. Why will no one love them. ;_;

4.) Thoughts on organized religion?
Any human organization is bound to be flawed, have problems, and make mistakes. But if they are also striving towards truth, then the truth will guide them towards goodness as well.

(Totally watching Ever After and I love their first kiss so much. THE MOST ADORABLE.) (They have good technique just sayin'.)

5.) Last book you read.
Spindle's End, by Robin McKinley. I still enjoy it muchly, but I find it--interesting, what she decided to include and what she decided to leave out, in telling Rosie's story. The last time I read it I was struck by the theme of family within it, and how families are defined and function and evolve over time; this time I snagged on the idea of identity, and what makes a person who they are. A little ramblier than I remembered, but still good.

The second thing: I remember this song, how many years after I first saw it? And I found it on Youtube today and felt a desire to share it with everyone:

Comments

[jade-sabre-301.livejournal.com]

1. When did you realize you were probably going to become an ex-pat, and how'd you feel?

2. Are there any lines in your dissertation/thesis/whatever-they-call-it-at-that-level-in-that-country that you are REALLY PROUD OF, and what are they, and why?

(Unless you don't want to think about that giant paper, in which case, post a cat picture. :-b)

3. Favorite song when you were thirteen.

4. Something borrowed that you never returned, or was never returned to you?

5. Best/worst advice you've ever gotten.

:-D

[keestone.livejournal.com]

1. I think it really hit home when we bought a freaking house last year. It was becoming increasingly clear with the recession, because one of us has a steady job, but we'd always been discussing the capability he had to take a career break for up to five years and still come back to the job if things didn't work out for my career in the US. But of course, you can never step in the same river twice, etc. I'm still really ambivalent, but you can't go home again so I need to just suck it up or something.

2. Oh gosh, it's such a blur . . . here's one:

"In its artfully arranged arabesque of unnaturalness, the court is itself grotesque. Exemplary in its decadence, its celebration of the exotic and the grotesque, it is most captivated by the grotesquery of one who does not realize his monstrosity but believes all respond to his sincerity. The Dwarf, presented as a grotesque figure of amusement, is
actually closer to nature and in fact presented as a child of nature — a child of the forest who only knows nature."

I particularly like the phrase "artfully arranged arabesque of unnaturalness" to describe the Spanish court in "The Birthday of the Infanta", because I'd just spent several pages going over the history of the word "grotesque" and the various meanings that word had, and in that phrase I feel like I summed up several hundred years of art history while showing exactly why Wilde would be interested in using it. :)

That chapter was such a pisser, but I'm proud of it. And my supervisor and examiners all seemed to agree that it was some of my strongest work. (And it's a Thesis on this side of the pond.)

3. Very likely Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King" from Peer Gynt. Or possibly the final piece in Stravinsky's Firebird. Fast forward a couple years, and I would probably say two paired song from Cat Stevens' concept album Numbers, "Majik of Magiks" and "Drywood", but I don't think I started playing those obsessively before I was fifteen or so.

4. I actually "lost" a library book. It was a copy of The Robe. Um, I actually really and truly did lose it. And then I found it again. But by the time I found it, the "late" fee was bigger than the "lost book" fine, and it was out of print and I really wanted my own copy so I paid the "lost" fine and kept it.

5. Possibly worst and best at the same time: The smug ignorant asshole head of "Grace Christian Schools" (basically the umbrella my parents homeschooled me under during High School that provided me with an official transcript and made applying for colleges a bit more simple) told me (and my mom) it would be a horrible idea to go to college out of state, because when I met my husband, I'd probably need to settle down where he was from and then I'd be far away from my parents.

I know. The irony, right? Because if my parents had let me go to college in MA like I wanted, I wouldn't have had the money to study abroad and I probably wouldn't have taken the burning desire to experience living somewhere farther away than seven miles from where I was born to living in another country. And then I wouldn't have met Beloved. Or ended up an expat.

[keestone.livejournal.com]

You know, I never cease to be amazed at how my life appears to be determined by whim. Why do people ever plan anything? Nothing ever goes according to goal!

Fickle finger of fate!