( Comment here. ) 

It's been a few years since I've done a comprehensive pet post. I was reminded because gamesiplay invited her friends-list to share picture of their pets in her comments... but I didn't want to take up the whole comment thread with pictures, so I decided I'd better make my own post. ;)

( ALL THE PETS. )

And there you have the gigantic pet post. :)

All right, finals are underway. Time to get back to this 100 Things business.

We left off when God had just finished putting the heavens and the earth in order, and his prize creation was just about to start making a mess of it all, with the help of a certain irresistible tree.

I’m sure you all basically know how the Eden story goes, but if you haven't actually read it, you might be surprised by how short it is. It’s about a page and a half long (Gen. 2.4-3.24). But I think you’d be hard pressed to find another story that packs quite as much potential significance into such a small space.

( Let me see if I can explain. )

...It would make sense here to talk a bit about Milton and the Christian interpretation of the Eden story as “original sin” and the “fall” of man (I don’t know how I managed to not talk about Milton for almost this whole post), but this is already getting long. Maybe some other time. :P

(I feel like I should be citing sources on this stuff. >_> I'm not going to go to all that trouble, but if there's anything in particular you want a source for, just let me know.)

Okay, so. Yeah. I'm actually going to try this. 100 posts -- sometime over the course of the indefinite future -- about Judeo-Christian traditions.

And while I don’t promise to keep to any kind of chronological or thematic order, there’s probably no better place to start than in the beginning.

So here are some thoughts on ( the creation of the world. )

...I have no idea if I have the stamina for 100, or even, like, three of these, but there you go.

(Also I may possibly be considering signing up for 100 Photos of My Little Ponies Doing Random Things. Or 100 posts about ancient Sumer/Babylon/Akkad/Assyria. Or both. >_>)

This? Is awesome.




{Take the 100 Things challenge!}

LJ is really quiet these days, and I know at least for me, a big part of the reason I don't post much these days is because I don't really think people care about most of the stuff I want to post about. But as I said to roh_wyn, I'd much rather see people making lots of LJ posts about things they're passionate about, even if some of them don't especially interest me personally, than a silent LJ-world where everybody is too considerate to post anything at all.

I think this challenge is a great excuse to post about things you love posting about anyway, or things you always wanted to post about but couldn't find a good reason, or whatever. I really hope some of you guys will try it. I'd love to see more posts here! :)

I'm thinking of doing something like 100 Judeo-Christian Traditions (like, textual traditions, mostly Old/New Testament stuff, but probably some apocryphal stuff and folklore traditions too). Either that or 100 Black & White Horror Movie Picspams. XD

Happy New Year! :)

Of course you knew I'd be back to follow up the Karloff picspam meme with a Lugosi picspam meme.

( Who can resist a picspam? )

I do promise to shut up about him for a while, though. Partly because I'm like three days behind on my Greek Lit readings. >_> We're up to Callimachus, whom my professor described to us as follows:

"Callimachus was probably the most well-read man ever. He read every book in the library of Alexandria, and wrote a synopsis and an author biography for every one. How many books were in the library of Alexandria? We don't know. But we know the catalog listing the books was six hundred volumes. That's the kind of guy Callimachus was. I like to compare his writings to the works of James Joyce, except that they're fragmentary and in Greek. So if you take Ulysses and translate it into a notoriously difficult language, and then you shoot it with a shotgun -- that's Callimachus." (Pause. Bright smile.) "He's my favorite!"

To be fair, I think English is probably an equally notoriously difficult language. Especially the way Joyce does it...

You know, until this semester, I had never turned in a single essay late. So much for that. My ten-page essay that was due on Halloween is now a whole week overdue. I keep trying to make myself write it, but I just plainly do not have ten pages worth of stuff to say. Well, no, I mean, I've got an idea for a topic that would probably go for a good ten pages. But it would take a lot of time and work to make it good, because I'd need to do some research first, and the thing is already a week late. AGH. And of course, this is the one class I absolutely cannot drop; I can't graduate without it. And this paper is worth 1/3 of my grade.

Whatever. I was starting to compile notes when my sister got home from work, and she proposed that we watch some Boris Karloff movies, and then she proposed that I write my essay instead, and I totally ignored her second suggestion.

( Parenthetically... )

And hey, I just remembered ritaskleinewelt's post featuring Part 2 of the Celebrity Picspam Meme, so guess what? ( You get a Karloff picspam. )

...I keep thinking I should feel guilty for spamming you guys with more bad old horror film nonsense all the time, but it seems the alternative is for me to post nothing at all except the occasional apology for never posting anything. Or, uh. Write essays. :P More picspamming it is.

Last night, my sister and I put the last layer of paper mache on Satan and left him to dry in my room. My sister had said she might paint him while I was at school today, but when I got home she was out with friends, and Satan was still waiting in my room. So I come in and say to him (out loud, because I'm the kind of person who talks to inanimate objects, especially sentient-looking ones, out loud): "Ah, Satan. You haven't been painted yet. But tonight... tonight we will bring you to life. There will be lightning, and we'll make our monster."

I had completely forgotten about this when, several hours later, just after sunset, storm clouds rolled in. It rained for exactly five minutes. There was lightning. I wasn't thinking about Satan or Frankenstein then; I was worried about the cardboard house front. I didn't remember about the lightning until later, when we were outside giving Satan his second coat of paint under the porch light.

He hasn't started moving his fingers yet, much less grunting, stumbling around, or trying to hug anyone. I'll let you guys know how things develop. If he does come to life, though, I'm determined to try to be a better father than Victor Frankenstein was. In the first place I won't chain him up in the cellar and leave a sadistic hunchback to mutilate him with torches. That might make a difference.

A grunting, bumbling Satan is a bit hard to picture, though. And if, like Mary Shelley's version of the monster, he gets up and at once starts quoting Paradise Lost at me, I think we'll have an entirely different problem on our hands...

It's 2:00 in the morning. In three hours I need to be at the airport. Russia, and all that, you know.

Clearly, it is time for ( ramblings about The Merchant of Venice and Macbeth! )

In the course of my education, I've discovered that the best way to get anything done is to have something else to procrastinate about. At the moment, I'm procrastinating about Russian grammar. And Russian spelling, and Russian vocabulary. And the writing of long emails in Russian.

I'm procrastinating by means of Shakespeare. Which I guess is more productive, anyway, than procrastinating by means of Star Trek, which was the other option.

Until fairly recently, I was actually -- as absurd as it may sound -- sort of opposed to the idea of seeing Shakespeare on film, or even at a theater: I was quite sure that the only way to really appreciate Shakespeare's work was by reading it. And I still hold that Shakespeare does need to be read; but I've also finally realized how much one gains by watching different versions of the plays. Gods know when I'll ever actually get to see a Shakespeare play on a stage, but for the time being, I've been making use of Netflix for... slightly more academic purposes than usual. Sort of.

Anyway. Ten films so far. I'm sure you guys are dying to know what I thought of them. ;) There's some picspamming, anyway...

( Hamlet - 1948: Laurence Olivier )
( Hamlet - 1990: Kevin Kline )
( Hamlet - 1996: Kenneth Branagh )
( King Lear - 2008: Ian McKellen )
( Othello - 1995: Laurence Fishburne, Kenneth Branagh )
( Macbeth - 2010: Patrick Stewart )
( A Midsummer Night's Dream - 1968: Ian Holm, Helen Mirren )
( A Midsummer Night's Dream - 1999: Kevin Kline, Christian Bale, Stanley Tucci )
( Much Ado About Nothing - 1993: Branagh, Emma Thompson, Robert Sean Leonard... )
( Twelfth Night - 1996: Ben Kingsley, Helena Bonham Carter, Stephen Mackintosh... )
( Oh, and also Titus, which was too bad to watch. )

Looking this over, I wonder if I should be ashamed that half of my reactions seem to consist of damn these guys look good in period garb. Er. So much for my intellectual pursuits...

So! I've been 28 for more than a week now, and I figure it's time I went ahead and made a post about that, even though the computer is still not working. (I do read LJ every day, though. I just never comment because I can’t stand typing on the netbook. AGH KEYS WHY ARE YOU SO FLAT.)

Ahem. So, I kind of got two birthday presents this year. The first, which was my “real” birthday present, was not so much exciting as simply practical: I got a bed, to replace the one that had to be thrown out on account of Edward bedbugs. It is a loft bed from IKEA, and it's nice because, being a loft bed, it leaves most of the floor open -- which means I can buy more bookcases. ;) Somewhat less nice is the fact that I tend to hit my head on the ceiling nearly every time I climb up to go to bed. This sleeping-seven-feet-off-the-ground thing may take some getting used to.

I’ll probably post pictures of my room again eventually, but for the moment it’s still a disaster area because I have still not cleared out/cleaned all the furniture and other effects, so it’s basically still a bedbug hazard zone. I haven’t even unwrapped my new mattress; I’ve been sleeping on it with the plastic seal still intact, so that the bugs won’t be able to make a home there. Now that finals are over, I’ll probably have another exciting bedbug-eviction day soon, tomorrow or Saturday. But anyway.

My other birthday present (which isn’t really a birthday present because I’m paying for a fair part of it), is this:

( My sister and I went and got My Little Pony tattoos! )

Okay, okay, I know, you’ve been waiting for pictures of the actual tattoos. This stuff is important, okay? Important, I tell you!

...But, right. ( Actual tattoo photos, although the tattoos are not finished yet. )

:DDDD

(And: not gonna lie, it did hurt, though really not that much except when he was inking near the ankle bone. The outline and the coloring of the hair/eye/symbol took maybe half an hour (my sister’s took a lot longer, because the guy did hers first and was sort of warming up, I think.) While he was tattooing me, I was reading the second act of Antony and Cleopatra. Because apparently that’s what I do when classes are finally over. I read Shakespeare in tattoo parlors instead of at the library. >_>)

This post may be entirely the result of my having written way too many essays and gotten way too little sleep in the past week, but.

We’re reading our last play of the semester in my Shakespeare class. It is The Tempest. I know absolutely nothing about The Tempest (except that I gather, based on a bullet point from Oscar Wilde’s preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, that Caliban is going to look into a mirror at some point), and so far I’ve only read the first act. But before I keep going, I have to say this, because any minute now Shakespeare is going to destroy my wonderful Star Trek parallel. Ever since the beginning of the second scene, whenever I think of Prospero, Miranda, and Ferdinand, I keep seeing this:



( In which I elaborate by means of more Star Trek screencaps. )

Incidentally, it's Shakespeare's birthday sometime this week. Possibly today. Who knows. (The English department at ASU is celebrating it today.) I... have apparently chosen an extremely odd way to keep the holiday. Well, cheers to the Bard. *toasts*

This post, by the way, is brought to you by the ROFLBOT lolcat generator, since my computer with Photoshop is still thoroughly broken. :P Screencaps from TrekCore. Text from -- Shakespeare. Yeah.

Yesterday was awesome: for the second time, I got to meet hamsterwoman, as she was in town. :D We got coffee and hung out for a while in the morning before I had to go to class. I think we may have kind of spent like two hours talking about linguistics. XD (Thanks for taking time to meet up! It was great seeing you again. :)

An added bonus was that, at a bookstore on the way back home, I finally found a copy of Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions. ( Stuff. )

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Christ—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins

Oh wow, I almost forgot to make my annual St. Patrick's Day post. Billy Corgan is 44 today.

I think that's... actually all I have to say about that. But for the sake of actually posting something, here is the "Tonight Tonight" video.

( Cut. )

Anyway. Yeah. Happy birthday, you lovely strange man.

Conversation from five minutes ago on the bus ride home:

Bus driver: How'd you do on your exams?
Me: I think I did all right. They were mostly essays, so I don't have my grades yet.
Him: What do you have to write about on those essays? Just anything?
Me: Uh. Well, it depends on the class. In my Folklore class I had to write about the stories we studied. In my history class I had to write about Napoleon. So it just depends.
Him: Was he a pretty good guy?
Me: ...Napoleon?
Him: Yeah.
Me: [*boggles*] He... did some good things. But he also started wars that got a lot of people killed.
Him: Ah. Like Barack Obama.

Yes, Mr. Bus Driver. Exactly like Barack Obama.

Just these two more days of school, and then Spring Break. Midterms done, one paper left to write. And in theory, they'll let me know tomorrow, by email, whether or not I got into the summer Russian program in Kazan. *crossed fingers* I had a dream the other night that my application was rejected, which I'm rather hoping is not a portent. :/

Anyway, while I'm here, ( have some random kitteh photos. )

...ATTACK KITTY!

Right, well. I haven't been posting much, mostly because my computer is still not entirely recovered from whatever virus/spyware thing it was afflicted with two weeks ago, blast all. Things are mostly working now, except the computer still won't reboot (I have to shut it off manually), and some websites -- pretty much anything with ads -- cause it to freeze up. Eh. I've also not been posting because most of the things I'd want to say are either not really worth saying at all, or else would require way too much effort to say well. And it seems more sensible to say nothing by keeping silent than to say nothing in a lot of words.

But for the moment, I'm here to say nothing in a lot of words. Behold, a meme! ... But at least it's a ( book meme. )

Right, and now it's three in the morning. Now I remember why I stopped filling out memes...