Onward through the fog

What did I just watch? I just. I don't even. I'm not really sure. Let's make this a Cracked article.

SEVEN WTF MOMENTS
( Okay this cut is for spoilers even though I'm not doing plot details so whatever )
FIVE COOL BITS

( There are a few more spoilers here I guess. Not really though. )


So, final word.

Everything they kept from the first movie: awesome.

Nearly everything they cribbed from other movies, genres and tropes: not so awesome, also, waste of time. I think there was maybe an hour of Sherlock Holmes Movie in my 130-minute Sherlock Holmes movie. 90 minutes, tops. The rest was Sherlock Holmes... starring In Something Else.

I had the strangest of morning dreams: for the space of an hour, time slowed down.

I woke up an hour early, which probably wasn't unusual today. I contentedly reset my alarm and turned over, happy for another bit of rest.

I had, in quick succession, two extremely active dreams.

I woke up in a panic, sure that I'd slept in.

It was four minutes later.

Lather, rinse, repeat. It's 11 past the hour and I've been to comicbook!Mars and back. Pull the covers up and try again. A whirl through undergraduate life but everyone is purple! Wake up: it's only 20 past.

I guess I kept dreaming in superspeed, but what it felt like was that hour was never going to end. I could have kayaked to Japan and when I got there it would still not be 9am.

Could use another hour like that, now and again.

NYCC's over, and the paper due in 15 minutes is just barely half-complete. It's a no-sleep night after four long days. It feels like my life's accelerated to the point that Twitter is in fact the right medium to document it. I have so little perspective on what I'm doing that I have to cling to the few flashes of long-view I get and just hope it's all rushing in the right direction. I don't know how I'm going to make it through final-papers time.

Sometimes I just want to punt it all to the curb and Occupy but I'm doing better for myself and for others where I am

I think.

A deep dark lagoon indoors, craggy rock running up to smooth tile encasing it all, two arced points of black glassy rock formation not quite meeting, the greenish water between them swirling almost black. A warp point. Not enough for a Gate. Good.

(This companion was almost Saria in aspect, slight and broody and sharing no information but useful in most contexts - from the back row. Ze sat crouched on the rocks after the I-protagonist had gone to bed, calculating. Hir inner monologue appeared in text, and I dream-read it.)

「　... Robo was fighting to try to reconstruct a past that never was, while Ayla was working too hard to create a future she'd never see the full range of.

a SEREMSET
a SULIMJYAR
and a SOLYNPEP

only, out of the Nine who would become the Yggdrasil.

It'd have to do.　」

Holy hell how is it only 9pm.

I got up at 6 this morning to finish the homework due in the 8am class. (This tardiness was not my fault; I was exhausted last night and the download for the audio part was going to take like four hours. Anyway.) Class ended at 9.15 at which point I buzzed up to midtown to get my silicon mold injected with wax a couple times. This took so long that I ended up leaving the mold at the casting studio and coming late to 11am Sociolinguistics.

At first SociLing was really discouraging; there are six students in the class and the other five have all been in school longer than me. Three already have linguistics MAs. I am also, I think, the eldest student. What am I even doing here? I asked myself. What do they all know that I'm going to have to scramble to keep up with?

In the second half of the class, we touched on gender and language use, and the question of whether you can tell someone's gender from hearing them speak came up, and the immediate class response was 'yes: a man's larynx is bigger, so his speech is pitched lower.'

Which I didn't make an issue of. I took a breath, two annoyed notes, and let it pass. But I went up to the professor afterwards and just said, "I had a problem with connecting 'larynx size' with gender instead of sex on the whiteboard, but I didn't want to derail you." And he said, "Yes, well, for example [the boy behind you] is dedicated to studying only formal syntax, and it would have taken at least twenty minutes to sidetrack and explain things to him. We'll touch on that later."

So... yeah! I may be the oddball out, but I'm at least putting together a thesis that he said is "definitely a sociolinguistics topic." Which is apparently not true for at least three out of five classmates.

And I have thought about other things than my PhD for some part of the last three years. So there's that too.

Anyway class was out at 2pm and it was back to the casting studio*, and then BACK down to campus for a mostly unsuccessful textbook run - but I did get school supplies! Footsore and weary from hitting up four bookstores for Weber's Protestant Ethic (among other things,) I settled my butt at an Italian barstaurant that serves unlimited and delicious fingerfood to anybody who drinks there between 5-7. The bartender – not Maurice. Maurelio? Argentinian dude – was just starting work that day. On hearing that I'd just snagged a new job**, he refilled my lemon ice vodka on the house. So of course I tipped 50% and still only paid $10 for two sexy drinks and a healthy dinner in Manhattan. I call that a goddamn win.

After that I cruised on over to the student center to print out my Weber*** and hit up the Comic Book Society. A cute group of undergraduate nerds, but when your 5-person officer board is all-male and your club attendance is 80% female it says something. We'll see what the gender balance is like next week when there isn't free pizza. Assuming I go back, of course – I plugged my bookstore and let them know about Kate Beaton's book party, but they're not my crowd. They still think DC is salvageable and Whedon can do no wrong. Do I really need to be a grizzled voice of bitter reason? I think not.

Then again, I might want to submit something to the quarterly student anthology.


*I also picked up wax carving tools at the neighboring metalshop. Because I totally needed another crafting hobby.

**New job: On the weekends. More details to come, maybe. I will not have free time this semester.

***Printing out Protestant Ethic at ten cents a double-sided page: $4.20. Copies of same in your standard bookstore: $20 and up. You know, some days I just can't wait for Print-On-Demand to put pricing like this out of business.

I was walking rapidly down Mercer Street, trying to hold in my tears.

One of the itinerant graphic designers, all folded up against a building with her Mac on her knees and a ratty sweater tied around her shoulders, noticed I was in distress and called out, hey, do YOU know how to deal with the new Final Cut? (Because that must be why I was upset, right, because I'd been wrestling with software.)

I looked at her and almost, almost lost it. But then I faced forward, sped up and moved on.

I don't remember why I was so upset. Just that walking fast helped.

Dreams are weird.

I return! How are things with you, my English-speaking buddies?

I hope you all had a good summer, or at least a tolerable one. Mine was quite nice - four hours of language class and five hours of language homework every day, interspersed with calligraphy and tai chi. So really it was heaven, for some people. Okay, for me.

I'm trying to catch up on the summer news, but all this ~debt ceiling~ and ~ratings downgrade~ business just looks like so much posturing and political hooey. I wish the dudes who want to kill what's left of the American welfare state would just shoot it already, cut Social Security and Medicare now and be mobbed for their evils. They won't, tho.

London's news is at least real. Russell Brand, of all people, comes close to articulating a portion of my thoughts on the Jobless Generation:

"These young people have no sense of community because they haven’t been given one. They have no stake in society because Cameron’s mentor Margaret Thatcher told us there’s no such thing.

If we don’t want our young people to tear apart our communities then don’t let people in power tear apart the values that hold our communities together."

But his proposed solution is for everyone to suddenly become Gandhi, so fuck him.

I anticipate, with drier detachment than I deserve, many more youth riots to come. Obama's taught us that our votes don't matter; that in the end all our hopey-changey political ambitions only enriched the banks, lost more jobs, and cut our parents' Medicare. What other outlet do we have?

Wow, that went downhill fast. Tell me something that happened in the last two months? I'm sure I'm missing much.

昨天，我写完了第四个考试以后，老师们开始用“流利”。

＊另外：上个星期开始我写二年级的作业。

今天，我穿着印度的衣服去爬山。跟德国人的朋友说中文。跟韩国人的同学在一个非常漂亮的湖游泳。

然后，也有滚木材。

｜3

我很累。

而且我手痛。

蜜月完了。