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quoted: "save a horse; ride a cowboy" -los angeles, via ccc.
christine says it's shameful that i have no quotes, so she sent that one
my way. speaking of ccc, i made chocolate chip cookies yesterday afternoon. definitely the
best cookies i've ever made. but they definitely decreased my enjoyment of the ben & jerry's
chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream at the baby shower i went to with my parental units
later in the afternoon. in between, of course, i went for a bike ride.
no bike rides today. it's awfully rainy out. an appropriate day for a funeral. incidently,
i'm helping my cousin jeff with catering
the funeral of a family friend. sad day.
other news is rather thin on the ground. catch you in april.
quoted: i got nothing today. again. i blame allison d, really.
and i apologize. i haven't had my ears tuned to embarassing things people
say. i've also had rather limited contact with people outside my family. which isn't all
bad.
i went to jack and dan's yesterday for lunch with my mother and grandmother. lovely. and
then gramma took us out for ice cream. hurrah. we drove past a billboard that
read "counterfeit marriages endanger children". i'm generally opposed to vandalism,
but i really do hope someone blacks out "counterfeit marriages" and replaces it with
"bigotry". just for the record.
did you know that americans spend $30 billion a year on weight loss regime...roughly
equal to the official military budget of the people's republic of china. yes yes,
the US department of defence claims true expenditure on the people's liberation army
is closer to $90 billion. even if that's a more accurate number, its proportion to
the revenue of the atkins set is truly shocking.
quoted: i got nothing today.
my acquaintances are all famous: my friend allison D's mom is in a
photo in the paper today, and the piece that the today show just did on swearing
included a very short interview with somoeone i know. the problem: the show didn't
say where they were interviewing people, and i can't remember how i know the guy.
i would have initially guessed seattle or portland. certainly not england, but
the shots looked like they were from clyde's, on M street. maybe he went to AU? GW?
my memory is going in my old age.
i had the strangest dream last night: it involved printing my thesis at the chch library,
picking up my gramma to go to lunch with her today, wheelchairing down a grassy hill
in a park, past 3 bicyclists who were throwing cheeseburgers at a woman sitting at the
bottom of the hill. hurrah for my subconscious.
i did actual work yesterday. and hopefully more today. and hopefully a bike ride, too.
hopefully.
quoted: "someone is manipulating this game other than the teams" -mom
my brother complains that the updates are getting published far too late.
that might be true, but i'm totally on home schedule by now, which means lazy mornings and
lazier afternoons. highlight of the day (and almost as exciting as the $7 sweater): i got
a kind-of free haircut today. this guy blaine who cuts my hair at weldon barber happens to be the hippest full time
resident of spokane. he asked me to bring him back a man bag from england. i happily
complied, despite not being altogether sure what a manbag was at the time. so i got him
a £13 bag from h&m, and he paid for my $26 haircut today and didn't let me give him
a tip. spokane really is the best place ever.
in other news, i spent almost the whole of yesterday avoiding work by watching the senate
judiciary committee meetings on immigration reform. it was surprisingly non-partisan.
it was also surprisingly similar to high school. sen. specter (R-PA), the
chairman of the committee, was clearly losing patience with the seemingly endless
stream of amendments, offered the committee members a short recess if they promised
to come back. he sweetened the deal by offering to buy them pizza. it was C-Span at its
finest.
quoted: "have you ever seen an old lady fall down?" -nordstrom escalator
so i was watching fox news this morning... don't ask why. it was six am
and both c-spans let me down, while all the other news channels were at commercial break.
anyway, they had the standard republican strategist/democratic strategist guests. it seems
that even fox news has recently discovered republican vulnerability at the midterm elections...
considering a 26/62 split on the right track/wrong track question, it's probably about time.
anyway, the republican strategist repeated the standard "the dems have no message" talking
point. the dem strategist reminded viewers of the newt gingrich-inspired slogan: "had enough?".
anyway, what got my goat was that the republican claimed that their 1994 midterm campaign was
about their having a plan rather than about people being fed up with a lazy democratic
incumbency in congress. his specific example: having been campaign manager for george
nethercutt when he beat speaker of the house tom foley in 1994. but i remember that campaign,
despite being 13. it was here in spokane, after all. nethercutt won because he said foley
had lost touch with his constituents, and he pledged to retire after 3 terms in the house
of representatives. then he went back on that 3 terms later. big surprise.
anyway, this made me think about rove & co's achilles heal: their tenacious belief in ideology.
it is, after all, a problem they share with islamic extremists: both mistake the support
(or resignation) they receive from their constituents is based on the population at large
sharing their over the top ideologies, be they neoconservative or islamist. that, of course,
is codswallop. groups who feel threatened, fearful, or powerless are generally inclined
to cling to fundamentalism and the apparently strong leaders who espouse it. but fear
and loathing cannot survive indefinitely, leaving those leaders three options: meet
the expectations of the people, oppress the people, or get left behind.
for all the fear-mongering about the interminable war on terror, i think we'll find that
terrorist actions will lose hold over the imaginations of people in the muslim nations of
the near east as those people's fears subside. it's sorta like the whole gay marriage thing:
in the winter of 2003-4, all the god-fearing christians in this great nation of mine
convinced themselves that the sky was falling. they were so scared that the gays would
go tempting every straight man out of his divinely-ordained state of matrimony into a
same-sex "marriage"--the term always has to be in quotes, mind, or the gays have already
won. but massachusetts still hasn't fallen into the bowels of hell en masse, and
christian chicken little's cry of alarm is less effective every day.
thank god.
wow. that was a long ramble. apologies. but head over to the new york times for more evidence that
the president was pretty darn intent on going to war. what a turkey.
ok. so i had a great experience yesterday. i went down to kinkos to print a copy of my thesis
on some sort of fast laser printer. but when i got there it was 20 cents a minute to use
the computer and 49 cents per page to print in black and white! so i left. anyway,
i headed downtown to see if there was anything fun to buy. after disappointment at nordies,
the gap, banana, and abercrombie, i found a supercool grey oscar de la renta cardigan at macy's.
my parents say it's a grandpa sweater, but i'm pretty sure they're wrong. the little tag said
$55. not unreasonable, right? well even better since the sign on the top of the rack read
"50% off". $27.50 is an even better price. but when i got to the counter, i was informed that
it was actually 50% off the previous sale price of 75% off. so the sweater came to $6.87, which
my handy currency converter tells me is £3.93.
gosh i like spokane.
quoted: "i don't feel like i have to toot" -mom
today is the 29th anniversary of my paternal grandfather's death.
not that i was alive back then, but it does remind me that my mom was younger than i
am now when her dad died. sad day.
i missed the feast of the annunciation. sorry. only 9 months until christmas!
now that gonzaga, georgetown, bc, and UW have all fallen by the wayside, the
only team i have left to cheer for is villanova. go wildcats!
so this guy jed conklin, who took a funny photograph
of me for the spokane paper a couple years ago, just won an award from the national
press photographers association: he's region 11 photographer of the year. as robert
points out, though, region 11 includes BC and the yukon, which aren't technically
part of the nation. we're just saying. nonetheless, i really like his photography.
there's a narrated
slideshow of it over at the S-R blog. check it out. apparently he does weddings.
if only i were getting married.
finally, i would like to apologize to everyone i know for my negligence in responding
to the backlog of personal emails i have. sorry sorry sorry. i'll get
replies written soon. i hope.
quoted: "that's why i want to win: to show them how stupid and wrong they are." -godmother
and yet we lost. very disappointing game. let us speak no more of it. and let
us look forward to the georgetown-florida and nova-bc games. the former is bound to cause a rift
with joe. the latter will just be too too difficult to choose sides. brandon and tommy went
to villanova, of course. but uncle steve and callie went/go to boston college. plus, it's
jesuit. i'm torn.
twenty-six years ago today, salvadoran archbishop oscar romero was gunned down in the middle
of mass. he's featured on the west wall of westminster abbey among other twentieth-century martyrs.
quoted: "i hate to sleep with clothes on" -channel 4
first things first: infinite congrats to my dear friend tom on getting
into a PhD program. hurrah! but just in case anyone was keeping track, far two many
of my friends are going to be dr-so-and-so. we'll go in the order that i met them:
allison, becky (c), katie, bob, todd, tom, mary, mark, katie, christine, and ed.
if we add my sister (mcat in a month: ack) and my cousins (karen, phil, angela and peter,
christine, katie, maria, and austine), you'll see we're truly at doctor overload. or we'll
see how dumb i am compared to my friends and family. either way.
exciting spokane news of the day: 50 cent is coming to film a movie here.
with christina ricci. it makes one's head spin to contemplate the genre of movie that
would put them side-by-side. other people are in it, too, but i forget them.
on to reader responses: christine agrees that ms knightley is annoying. and points out
that she talks funny. bobbo reminded me that some people don't have the patience for the 5
hour bbc version. i think that's nonsense. it flies by. when you're a graduate student
and you have plenty of knitting to do, anyway.
i've also been corrected: apparently it was the pilsbury (not betty crocker) bake-off. apologies.
i have to go get my teeth cleaned now. hurrah!
quoted: "i'm not sure we were supposed to show that before the watershed" -six nations
the cause of that comment was a naked french rugby player walking very slowly
behind another french rugby player being interviewed in their locker room on the BBC. jack's
quick-witted younger brother responded with "i wish they wouldn't show that ever". but poor
england lost to ireland. sometimes i like to watch sports.
the bulldogs face the bruins tomorrow night in the sweet 16, btw. go zags.
i just watched the awards ceremony for the annual betty million dollar crocker bake-off. who knew
such a thing existed? wonderful.
i watched the new pride and prejudice on the flight monday. in whole this time. and i
know some of you will disagree, but it's simply awful. awful. the characters are all so two
dimensional. the story line is choppy. everything feels so rushed. and therefore contrived.
there were a few things that i did like, of course: the post-engagement discussion between
lizzie and mr bennett was much better than the bbc one. and i thought the actor who played
wickham was better suited to the image of him as a handsome, grasping would-be dandy. but
he certainly did seem to be a minor character in this adaptation, didn't he? oh, and
it was good to see a convincing homely version of charlotte lucas.
on the other hand, it would be difficult for me to list all the things i thought were awful.
bingley comes off as a bumbling idiot. the original dialogue lacked austen's brilliance.
in the end, i guess it all comes down to the problematic fact that keira is to jennifer ehle
is as a rock is to an orange.
quoted: "i would have f___ed that rooster up" -high street
today is rowan and bailey's 8th birthday, which must be very exciting
for them, but it makes me feel awfully old. nevertheless: happy birthday, ladies!
quoted: "i FELL in DIOR" -carrie. SaTC.
today is our very own oxford cowboy's birthday. many happy returns, mike!
speaking of ladies, i got to have dinner with gretchen
i got another amazing amount of work done yesterday. i also packed for a week in london
and a month at home. i'm always afraid i've forgotten some category of clothing. like
clearly i've forgotten any sweaters. but hopefully that won't get in the way
of my editing like a mofo.
jack is recovering slowly from that horrific virus that's been going around...possibly
the same one i had three or four weeks ago, which laid me out for whole days. that
was rough. here's hoping he's recovered enough to enjoy my phat hotel room tonight.
now, since i'm going to london for a week, i beg that you'll forgive me for not updating
until the 21st of march. i'm flying home on the 20th, which (for everyone keeping track
at home) is the vernal equinox slash the first day of spring. hurrah!
the past 24 hours have been prety great. as of yesterday afternoon, i'm a confirmed
bachelor reprobate doctoral
student
christ church, of course, needs to have a set of jargon that differs from that of other colleges. other colleges have deans (generally graduate students who look after discipline and the social welfare of the undergraduates). at christ church, the dean is the head of college (and cathedral), so we call them censors. and we don't let postgrads do it. more confusingly is the fact that "students" at chch actually means fellows (to differntiate them from the members of the governing body who are canons of the cathedral), which leaves the rest of us plebs to be...um...not students.
anyway, back to my lovely day: ed made me a delicious dinner (though he and his flatmate eat far too fast), and when i returned home, i had 2 (TWO!!) emails about panda bears. one from christine linking to a woman who bribed someone into letting her hug a panda. even better was the email from susie with video of panda kindergarten i think if everyone in the world got to hug a panda once a month, there would be no more. then again, that's what they said about extending suffrage to women.
quoted: i got nothin today
so: short update this morning. apologies. i have confirmation of status viva
today. but first laundry and more hours in the library. what a fun way to spend the final day
of my next-to-last term at oxford. but then ed has kindly invited me to dinner, so that should
be fun.
i had a dream last night about going to lunch with both my kindergarten teacher (with whom
i share a birthday) and my 8th grade teacher (who was and i imagine still is fantabulous).
very nice. ok. must get to work.
happy 25th birthday, ian-julian!
quoted: "he can be...pernkickity" -supervisor
first things first: madonna's new video is pretty darn great. it
involves a roller-disco, bare-chested men, dance-fighting AND (becky's favorite)
a kid who dances real good. what more could one want. madonna herself looks remarkably
good. for being 47. ack.
yesterday was the first day of spring: warm and rainy. in celebration, i had a two hour meeting
with my supervisor. and by meeting i mean lunch at pierre victoire. i started with
a goat cheese and asparagus omelette, followed by a duck confit. very pleasant.
today i'm going to start stressing about tomorrow's confirmation of status viva. and
i'm going to spend most of the day in duke humfrey's library, transcribing data on
aliens in elizabethan london into my computer. don't hate.
quoted: "what am i going to do in a submarine?" -the village people
as i was walking home from patrick's birthday party last night, i was
passed by two young british women drunkenly singing "the day the music died". a crowd
favorite, it always sort of reminds me of my junior year of high school when my friends
ben and bekah shared a locker next door to me and brando. and then one day ben divorced
bekah and she had to take all her stuff out of the locker. but that is neither here
nor there. the music died on 3 february 1959. 1959! in case anyone is counting,
that was 47 years, 1 month, and 5 days ago...or 17,200 days if you prefer to count that
way. don mclean's song was released in 1971, twelve years after the crash. for perspective
(i'm still young enough that 12 years seems like an incomprehensible period of time in the
abstract), kurt cobain killed himself twelve years ago.
four years, however, is a period of time that i can wrap my mind around, and it's
scary that four years ago, i was just getting back from visiting allison in england.
has it been four years since i graduated from college? oxford has totally yoinked my
youth, but it's given me plenty of black tie dinners. last night's was very nice. i
sat across from two first year graduate students. i like this year's cohort at graduates
at chch.
i had a dream two nights ago that i was back at seattle prep, in a PE class. they were
making us play volleyball in teh new york subway system. with a basketball. it hurt a lot.
it's awfully rainy outside today. i have a meeting with my supervisor at noon, and then
we're going to lunch. hopefully i'll get some good work done today, and ian will give
me some tips on passing my confirmation of status viva, which is scheduled for friday.
happy 21st birthday, beckers!
quoted: "lesbians love me" -mandahouse
as ben
quoted: from the early modern britain seminar i'm still massively displeased about oxford cutting off my lexis nexis. mark
put together a lovely lunch for me yesterday, and we should wish him happy trails today, as
he becomes inexplicably ascetic in his quest to write the two final chapters of his D.Phil
thesis.
quoted: "i'm not a sissy liberal...i'm just sleepy" -satchel (aka me)
quick update today. CONGRATULATIONS to the little one for
making staff at camp. my ideas for your camp name include bulldozer, attack mode, and
bobb-orgasm (that last one might not be camp appropriate). yay! well done! while it will
free up a car, the house will be so lonely without you this summer, bo. and you'll
miss the beach? what what? sad day.
quoted: "i had the strongest butt muscles after that trip" -jack
firstly, i should clear out the backlog of things that
i keep forgetting to mention. it seems silly to complain about the snow now that we've
had two sunny days in a row. so i won't. instead, i'll say that walking
through the botanic gardens in heavy snowfall makes them even more beautiful than normal.
i also neglected to mention that thursday was national book day, which i celebrated
by visiting some libraries and extracting information from nine different books,
published between 1811 and 2005. just barely missed the two century mark. very disappointing.
quoted: "chickens don't clap!" -buster
so i had totally been planning to use that quote today, which is
from arrested development, the funniest show i've seen in ages. buster was angry
at his brother gob for calling him a chicken, but immitating the bird badly. then i was
delighted to stumble across this
article on brokeback mountain spoofs in yesterday's NYT, which led me
to this spoof. some families have
never seen a chicken, as a clip about halfway through the spoof shows. hilarious.
quoted: "i said chlamydia, but quietly" -Qi. the club part.
in like a lion indeed! not only did it snow in oxford yesterday afternoon, but
that snow is still around this morning! it isn't yet 7.30, but i'm still impressed. it's
very sunny out, but my weather thing says its 23º, so i'm not gonna go outside for a little
bit. it's back to the grindstone for me today after a rather intense interview yesterday.
i think it went well, but i've always been the worst judge of these things. the woman
who interviewed me was very intense...in a good way.
my baby sister is 21 today. normally, my mom would kick her in the face, but not today. alas,
becky's basketball team is still in playoff season, so no drinky drinking for her.
shannon pointed out an inaccuracy in sunday's quote of the day, so it has been corrected.
many thanks! but there ends anything interesting i might have to say. i don't know why i'm
so boring today. i do apologize. maybe i'm just hungry. i'll go solve that now.
"if everything is representation,
then taxation is representation, and clearly that's nonsense." -clive
"but is there room
for taxation without representation?" -steve.
this assertiveness thing seems to be working out well. suddenly i have an interview for a summer
internship. only problem: it's in LA. which doesn't bode well for my finishing my thesis before
september. but let's not count our proverbial chickens.
it's a massive work week. i have a meeting with my supervisor on wednesday and the viva for
my confirmation of D.Phil status on friday. in between i have a seminar. I'm also having
fiona, josh and ben around to dinner at chch tonight, and j patrick's birthday dinner tomorrow
night. life is rough, and if jack would get up i'd totally make him breakfast and get to work.
might take today off from the gym, though that will require that i stop stuffing my face with
turkish delight.
i had a dream last night that i was driving around spokane with my parents, and we found
a road that took us directly into covent garden. that was useful. then the dream slipped
into an episode of dead like me involving
a bee sting and a house where the doors didn't fully fill the doorways.
i finished reading the mill on the floss last night. i don't think it was half
as good as middlemarch. i was left unconvinced by the way in which the relationship
between maggie and stephen was developed. still i cried like a baby at the end, even though
i knew what was coming. quotes are already up.
finally, before i head to the gym, if i read one
more time that "President Bush has survived rough scrapes before...But last week there
were signs that Mr. Bush's once limitless supply of political capital had few reserves left"
i'm definitely going to vomit. vomit everywhere.
stop the presses: this stupid university has discontinued its subscription to
the lexis nexis news service. GRRRRRRR. thank god i'm leaving in a term. this is too too
shame-making. how am i supposed to get my fix of old news? i was totally going to point out
previous instances of david kirkpatrick singing the president's political requiem precipitously,
but now i can't. what is oxford coming to?
if democrats prove incapable of capitalising on the republican party's immense idiocy in the midterm
elections this november, it will be nobody's fault but their own. i've got two fail-safe
talking points: fiscal responsibility and ending republican corruption.
if the democrats can stick to those, frame the debate, and not get distracted by their own
navels, we might get our country back on track sometime soon-ish.
today: breakfast, gym, libraries!
there's an article
in today's new york times about J J Redick (the duke basketball star to whom i'm wholly
indifferent) and Adam Morrison, the gonzaga player whom i think is kinda jerky and has the
ugliest facial hair i've ever seen. i'll be home for the latter half of march madness, you know.
unity dinner was fun and different last night. on account of christ church being able
to keep it up (the power, i mean) for the second day in a row, college moved us
at the last minute to a private room at malmaison, where the food was good (if
in somewhat small portions), the service was attentive, and the bill ended up being
rather less than it would have been in college. i've given up alcohol for lent, you
know, so that's that.
it seems i'll be having my confirmation of status interview a week from today. scurry.
the bush administration is so thoroughly full of jerkfaces that i've become numb
to their underhanded antics slash gross incompetence. examples from the national archives, the department of the interior,
and that
hurricane katrina travesty. the torture
stuff still gets me worked up, though.
in rather unrelated news, i've decided to delay lent by a week this year. mostly because
the rhodes shrove tuesday party was actually on ash wednesday, making the whole fast and
abstinence thing tough. then i have unity dinner tonight, ben's
later, sue
after pancakes, tamson dragged me to qi to test out her new board game, which was brilliant.
and that was my ash wednesday.
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