All My Evil Bunnies Love Me

One of the things I will regret in my later years is how extremely dull my life is, and how much I enjoy it anyway. For example, one of the more exciting events to happen in my life recently is that the Women's Studies Tentative Schedule of Awesome has been posted. I'm really looking forward to Babes in Bollywood, Gender and Religion, and Money, Sex, and Power.

Fig 1.2

Fig 1.1

I've been trying to answer the question How do you make social change? lately, and this has culminated in a small obsession with Naomi Klein. Not only did I rent her 40 minute documentary and fall in love with her, because she's ridiculously cute and I'm attracted to cuddly looking women, I listened to a terrible debate on WNYC called "No Logo vs. Pro Logo" in which Naomi (No Logo) and Sameena Something+otherpeople (Pro-logo) who had not read her book and criticised her for things she never said or addressed in her book talked for about an hour and a half. Considering how argumentative I am, note figure 1.1-1.2 in which I actually made venn diagrams in photoshop to prove something in an argument I was having about whether believing in God makes him exist, one can imagine the emotional rollercoaster this debate put me through. I couldn't even do anything. All I could do was sit there in my chair and listen while I was reduced to a  nervous wreck of compost.

Also, for some bizzare reason I've stopped getting my news fix only from Feministing.com for my fair and equal view of the world, and have been hooked on reading the CNN website lately. This stuff is really really bad. I'm actually reading this shit ... and enjoying how terrible it is.  I call it intellectual rubbernecking. No, resident op-ed journalist Joel Stein (who I had a crush on when I was 13 and he had a column in  almost every issue of TIME) DOES NOT write for cnn.com. One thing I really enjoy is how the editors don't discriminate what articles can go in their "Latest News" column.  For example, right now, 4/12 of the latest news columns are as follows: "Miss USA's bruising not from fall, but boos," "Ticker: 'Law & Order' star primes W.H. pump," "Celeb DUI docket: Lohan, Hilton, Richie, Rhymes Video," and my favorite: "Britney Spears: 'I truly hit rock bottom.'"

Friday was the first day of class, and I've discovered that on Mondays and Wednesdays I have a lovely (read: annoying) break between classes which goes from 11AM-2PM. Today is day one, I've finished my french homework, and I still have two and a half hours to go.

"Ceci n'est pas une pipe" Billboard

Ryan and I spent winter break together, slowly going bonkers from being together all the time. Our Winter Break Experiences peaked in the first few days of break when we went to LA to see Rothko and Magritte. The Rothko exhibit at the Pacific Design Center was a no-frills affair that exposed the amazing emotional experience that is looking at a Rothko (if you're into that kind of thing). The Magritte exhibit at LACMA was unbelievable, and I think I was captivated the whole time. I thought this billboard was really cool.

We tried to go to OCMA but they were closed.

Raspberries and Blackberries

We've recently become obsessed with eating raspberries and blackberries from a yellow bowl, which is "out of control delicious." We laughed at this phrase maniacally after we read it on a citysearch review and I am planning on using it often. We also made french toast together a few times, experimenting with different breads.

I'm going to get a Women's studies minor.

Some of us, mainly me, like to sleep in total darkness. I'm not sure if anyone has noticed this, as a google search of the problem has not yet yielded any results, but the powerbook "sleeping" light thing on the open button is REALLY REALLY BRIGHT. Not only is it bright, the brightness oscillates from really bright to light up the whole opposite wall bright. Brighter still is the green light on the power cord which notifies me that my computer is in fact charged, and that no, the cord has not been pulled out in the last five minutes that nobody has touched it and the laptop has been sitting in my dark room. 

All my subsequent blog attempts since 8/25 have failed terribly in capturing the wordy materiality of that post. Mostly I write things that go "I saw this. I liked it, and it reminded me of this. I was reading this and found a connection from A to B that i never realized before. So yeah." Rebellion within and against myself stirs.

The need to write is overwhelming me. I have a sudden urge to abandon all films and read novels. It is possible that tonight, I will finally stand up for myself and proclaim that I have an interest in everything, especially films and novels and poems and art, which means I'm not especially interested in anything, since apparently everything is interesting. None of this ridiculous idea of majoring in film. Why didn't I double major in Film and English and minor in art history and studio art, while taking a few poetry classes here and there? How am I going to support myself after I graduate and don't get into grad school? Why is there no major for the sad people comme moi? The question rankles. 

It's incredibly tiring being me and needing a bookcase. i KNOW that I could fit a bookcase behind my door. I'll suddenly have tons of space and I won't have to stack books in front of the books in my bookcase, or have piles of them under the bed. I could put my films all in a row upright like they should be, so that the ones on the bottom won't be crushed since they won't BE on the bottom. They'd be in a row. Like books, not getting crushed. I really need that bookcase.

Also-- Personal decision coming up here-- no more swearing. In the last five days I've suddenly started to swear. It sounds uneducated and very stupid. Too much television? Too much time? Too much crap from other people and from the external circumstances of my life? Too bad. No more swearing. Unless something really really really fuckworthy comes along.

Also-- more writing and reading. I'm losing my words these days. The most elementary ideas escape me. They get stuck in the stage of the formulation of the sentence, and I'm left with a gaping hole in the middle of qualifiers and prepositions and soft palates. I actually have no idea what a soft palate(s) is/are, but it/they apparently has/have something to do with language. My original conception of what a soft palate was had something to do with brie cheese and buffed, substantial, sterling butter knives, the kind that when you use them you are extremely sure of your dominance over the butter and you are 100% sure that you will cut through a whole slice. I'm not sure why. 

In french today I was reading the instructions for how to make certain sounds. This sounds like a good idea ("oh, finally, a scientific and systematic method of pronoucing things correctly. pas de problem!") until you actually try it. Suddenly my mouth felt cavernous and foreign: I actually have teeth in places where I didn't realize I had teeth, which seems impossible, since my teeth are in a nice and straight row which cost my parents a lot of money, and my tounge and the spacial relations engine in my brain should work together so that I should be able to interpolate where the teeth are. Unaccountably, I also realized that I really have very little control over my tounge. It's rather like a few bites into eating watermelon, when you really have no idea WHERE in your mouth the watermelon IS because it is so watery and it is just everywhere, but you are chewing and swallowing it anyway.

Books to read:

Margaret Duras' Lovers (or whatever it is called)

Zadie-whatevers' White Teeth

hmmm ... more Philip Roth? American Pastoral?

Denis Johnson

The two Toni Morrison books that I have had for several months

someday, East of Eden. Someday.

Brazil - Criterion Collection

Ryan and I watched Brazil today. It was made well and the sound/production design was good.

The other day we made a list of things to do. We're thinking about doing some Instructables projects to kill time.

And possibly go to Zinc cafe in Laguna Beach for lunch. More news on that later.

Thanks to Mel for the invite and the awesome package from japan!