Nothing I Can Do But Write About It

I am now officially a PhD candidate. Last month, on the 21st to be exact, I defended my dissertation proposal and was met with success. This basically means that I've done enough research and come up with some solid base experiments that have been approved to be the starting point for my dissertation. The whole ordeal was rather intimidating. Proposal defenses require public speaking (not to mention speaking in front of some extremely intelligent people who are capable of poking holes in everything), and that's never been my forte. I was so extremely stressed. My first couple of practices were awful, and I was almost convinced I couldn't do it. Somehow, I ended up pulling it together for the Real Thing. The presentation went extremely well, although the Q&A afterward was somewhat difficult. One of the professors asked me a question (at least I think it was a question) and for the life of me I couldn't make heads or tails of what he was saying. And his attempts at clarification only made things worse. After talking to the other students (and some other profs), I learned that not many other people knew exactly what he was asking. So I felt better.

I've also managed to complete all four of the Wilton Cake Decorating courses that Hobby Lobby offers. I now know how to cover a cake with fondant, make a tiered cake (columns and stacks), and make several different varieties of gum paste flowers. So I'm now hoping to start making a little bit of money with my new skill.
Speaking of which, a couple weeks ago, I had heard that Albertson's was looking for a cake decorator, so I went to find out more info. While I was there, the bakery manager had me decorate a cake. That was a fiasco. The icing they use was like pudding, and my roses kept collapsing when I tried to transfer them to the cake. I was not happy. I asked one of the decorators about putting them somewhere to dry and she basically said we didn't have time for that - that they had to "cut corners." "Bull shit!" I thought, snobby artist that I am. "I didn't just take all those classes and pay all that money so I could mass produce some mediocre cakes!" I told them I wasn't what they were looking for and walked out.
A few days later I got a call from some manager there telling me they needed an experienced cake decorator - someone who could make about 12 cakes in an hour!  Now, I have an appreciation for someone who could do that, but that someone is not me. I have to take my time, dammit. But it was fine, because they wanted me to work 4 days a week from 7 to 4 and that leaves little time for the stuff I need to accomplish this summer. I think I'll stick to private, specialty cakes so I can take my time with them.

So now that all of that is out of the way, there's still so much going on.
I'm presenting a poster at the Cognitive Science Society's annual conference in Washington, D.C. next month. So I'm trying to get my poster together and my results analyzed.
I want to have my second experiment up and running for the beginning of the fall semester, so I need to get started on that.
A close friend of mine asked me to be her maid-of-honor. Unfortunately she lives in Houston, and she's having an engagement party sometime within the next month, so I'll be doing that.
Aside from that, I've been trying to catch up on my books and video games. I keep falling further behind though because I'm constantly getting new ones. There's just so much entertaining stuff out there. And then there's the summer movies of course. I've seen quite a few already and I'll have something to say about them soon.

Current Location: home
Current Mood: productive

Since January, I've managed to:

Read:

1. The Soul Thief by Charles Baxter. A pretentious little book about a man who has a "prank" played on him. One of his peers assumes his identity, weird stuff happens, and in the end you're not really sure what the hell the book was about. I enjoyed reading it, and it was somewhat creepy (throughout the book I felt like things were a bit "off" and like I was in pursuit of something that I could catch glimpses of every now and then but never identify). My impression is that end of the book (and I don't count this as a spoiler) is supposed to make you feel like you don't know who's telling the tale, but it can easily be taken at face value, and if so, the only mystery would be "what is the author trying to do?"

2. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. It's about a girl who runs away from her abusive father, and using clues inadvertently left by her dead mother, finds a house run by beekeepers where she spends the summer. I loved reading this book. The writing was excellent, the characters were interesting, the main setting was peaceful, and the story was touching. This book made me want to run away and work on a honey farm.

3. The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor. A YA twist on the tale of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I'm not quite finished with it but I can say that I'm a tad disappointed. It's fun, but it leaves something to be desired. The characters are not flushed out very well, and the villain's scenes in particular are very cliche and unoriginal. I also often find my mind wandering when the characters are standing around talking about what to do next.

Listened to:

1. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. It's the story of a girl who is raped and killed, and her ghost recounts the events that her family undergoes after her death.
I don't know what all the hype was about, but I didn't like this book at all. It may have been that I listened to it on audiobook and the author (who was also the narrator) had an awful dry voice that seemed incapable of either expressing any emotion or changing in the slightest to differentiate among the different characters. And the story was too drawn out and kind of boring. I just didn't care.
Looking back, I can't believe I made it all the way through this.

2. Feed by M.T. Anderson. A YA SF novel about life in a world where everyone has a chip implanted in their heads that allows them to access information via the internet, shop for anything in the world, chat with their friends, watch TV, etc. When the main character and his friends make a trip to the moon, they get "hacked" by a religious fanatic and have to go without their feeds for a few days. The narrator's girlfriend is somewhat opposed to the direction the world is going in because of the feeds.
This book started off ok enough, but got pretty tired about halfway through. And the lingo was pretty neat at first, but was kind of overdone. So we gave up.
And the narrator was pretty good, although I'm noticing a trend with male narrators attempting to do female voices. It sounds like they produce female voices from by lowering and softening their voice, and using the back of their throat. Maybe this is the only way they can do it, but the result makes the female characters sound very passive, uncaring, and clueless. This is also true of the next book we tried:

3. Spin by Robert Charles Wilson. An award winning SF novel about a group of teenagers who experience the disappearance of the stars. Turns out that "something" has put a barrier over the earth. While the passage of time remains the same on earth, passage outside is so much faster that scientists are proposing  that within the next 40 years the sun will have expanded so much it will burn up the earth. Derek and I started listening to it on our way to his dad's wedding in Austin, and we managed to make it about a third of the way through. It starts off great: very exciting and intriguing, and you can't wait to find out what happens. But then it sort of slumps. It focuses too heavily on characterization when it should be answering questions. And it jumps around a lot, from the "present time" to the distant future, which is something like the year 4 X 10 to the 9th, where more questions are brought up but the author continues to remain coy. It kind of gets on my nerves, but I may finish listening to it at some point.

4. The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield. It's kind of a dark twist on Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights types of books. The main character is commissioned to write the biography of the prestigious and highly acclaimed author Vida Winter, who, up until now, has never told the truth about her life story. What the biographer gets is a story full of mystery and death.
I haven't finished it yet, though I'm nearing the end, so I'm not sure how things are going to tie together, but it's been a captivating tale. Margaret's voice actor does an excellent job (and for some reason it's usually pleasing to here any sort of British accent).

Movies:
As always, I've seen tons of movies, too many for me to detail here, but I'll list the more memorable ones.

1. There Will Be Blood. I found this to be quite boring, despite its box office success. As I felt wtih No Country for Old Men, I was left feeling "taken advantage of." Don't get me wrong, the acting was great, but what lesson was learned here?

2. Blood Simple. A well-done noir overall, but one of the things I HATE in fiction is this device where misunderstanding, misperception and subsequent lack of communication causes many of the problems:
A: "I can't believe it."
B: "What happened?"
A: "You know what happened."
B: "I don't know what you're talking about."
A: "You know what I'm talking about."
B: "No I don't."
A: "I can't believe you did that?"
B: "What did I do?"
A: "Come on, do I really have to say it."
B: "What?"
A: "It's not worth talking about. I'm going to bed."

And then people end up dead because A never said what it was he thought B did, and therefore B never had the chance to tell A that she didn't do this thing.
Lame.

3. The Vanishing (or Spoorloos). A Dutch/French movie about a man's search for his kidnapped lover. Another well-done one, but it's slow as hell, kind of depressing, and seems almost pointless when you find out what happens at the end.

4. The Boondock Saints. I had seen this when I was an undergrad, but didn't remember anything about it other than it was violent. Re-watching it I realized why. It's the same thing happening over and over again, just in a different setting, and most of those times you can't really figure out what's the cause of the "current" situation. I had no memory of the FBI agent, but he stood out this time, and was pretty freakin hilarious.

5. The Office. I've finally seen all of them so far. It's not often that I actually like TV shows, but this one is the greatest one ever made. And it's funny because when I got my first glimpse of it, I thought "oh this is stupid." But then I caught the tail end of the one where Michael and Dwight are delivering gift baskets to their former clients in order to convince them to come back (despite the fact that Dunder-Mifflin's lack of a website was a primary reason why they lost these clients, and Michael is very "anti-website"), and Michael thinks the GPS is telling him to turn so he drives into a lake and says something like "gift baskets are about trying to connect with people....computers are about trying to murder you in a lake." I was hooked from there. "WHERE ARE THE TURTLES?!?!?!?!" Great stuff.

Probably the best thing about graduate school (and this maybe only applies to small schools like ULL) is that you can pretty much make your own schedule. And I have no idea how I'll ever go back to doing 40+ hours a week. As I approach my proposal defense (which will be either at the end of this month or beginning of next...and it makes me want to barf every time I think about it), I realize that despite some of my aggravation with grad school, I've become disturbingly comfortable with it. Anyway, both of my advisers have finally given me the go-ahead to propose, which makes me nervous. Not only because I'll have to speak, answer, questions, and defend my research in front of a group of extremely smart people, but also because this means I'll be one step closer to being let loose into the world to see if I can make anything of myself.

In an effort to satisfy the part of my that needs to do something creative with the hands, I've taken up cake decorating. It was kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing, as I happened across the cake decorating stuff in Hobby Lobby one day and thought, "now there's something I need to do." As I left the store, I caught sight of the sign up sheets and ad that broadcast the Course 1 starting date as a week from that day. 2 months later I'm about to start the third course, fondant and tiered cakes, and I have to say that I don't remember the last time I ever felt this content. Decorating cakes (although somewhat expensive, time-consuming, and frustrating - when your cake breaks in half when you try to get it out of the pan) is pretty relaxing and gives me a great sense of accomplishment. And as bad as this might sound, I love showing my creations off (but I guess in that respect I would be no different from any other type of artist, so I don't feel too badly about being somewhat prideful. And  on this note, I recommend that anyone in grad school find something to do with themselves that's constructive, that has NOTHING to do with school, and in fact, makes you forget you're in school while you're doing it (and that you can show off).

Current Location: home
Current Mood: content

Just before Christmas I was finding myself extremely discouraged by my dissertation. My one adviser kept trying to set a date for my proposal defense, while the other kept insisting I wasn't ready and need to read more and become more conceptually grounded in the literature. Blah. I was feeling like a ping pong ball in this mad game where no one (particularly me) is aware of what the winning conditions are pointwise. I was with my first adviser: time to propose so I can get on my way to getting the hell out. My second adviser only insisted that I give a more detailed explanation of my third and forth experiments. I was reluctant to commit to them too much because I'm only still working on the first experiment, and who knows where things are gonna go after that. So I got extremely frustrated. Both of them suggested I take two weeks off, which I couldn't do because it would have been two weeks of "if I were working right now, I would get things done sooner. Plus, the Cog Sci annual conference is in D.C. this year, and if I could get something together to present, then I'd have  a good portion of the trip paid for. And I really want to go to Washington, dammit! So instead of taking time off, I tried to work harder. I finally sat down to read my second adviser's dissertation and made it halfway through the mind-bending Vandeloise book--in the meantime working on the third draft of my proposal (it turns out that, aside from seeing all those movies, that's where my Christmas break went!) I was still having trouble with the last two experiments, so, on a whim, I decided to ditch them in favor of something else. Not exactly sure what that will be though.
With the onset of the bright and shiny new year, I realized that I also had exactly one month to get something in for Cog Sci (Feb 1 deadline!). I was thinking I'd just do a poster of my first experiment and that way I'd only have to submit an abstract for the time being, but my advisers suggested that I try to submit a whole paper so I can see about getting it published in the proceedings and doing a talk, and if I can't get it done in time, just submit the abstract. So that's what I'm trying to do. At first it was fine. I already had the literature, I had the method section done, I had the data, I just needed to analyze it. Then I could put it all together and hopefully keep it under 6 pages. This is do-able, I thought, and was actually pretty motivated because, for once, I actually had a deadline that I could see!
But I'm feeling the stress again. I have 4 pages now and 8 days left, and I'm still trying to get to get to a point where I can analyze data. I'm currently listening to Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love and she's taught me an Italian expression that I love: che casino, che bordello. The direct translation is "what a casino, what a bordello," but it would more loosely translate as "what a freakin mess." That's my data. And it works on a whole other level: it's fucking me over. And somehow, when I wake up in the morning, I still want to do this despite my head telling me that I can't. I am so tired! But no time to think about it. Gotta keep going!

As always, I have not been at a loss for entertainment. I've see 5 movies in the theater so far this year. That's crazy. 5 movies in about 20 days.
1. Juno. Cute, funny, a bit edgy. Didn't go where I expected it to, and that turned out to be a good thing. It's about a teenage girl who gets pregnant and decides to give her baby up for adoption. She finds an ad in the paper about a couple who want to adopt, and she spends her time getting to know them.
2. Enchanted. I originally didn't want to see this because I thought it'd be the same old thing, but after it got good reviews, I changed my mind. It was supposed to be different because the fantasy world comes to the real world, and that was supposed to put a nice spin on things. Not really. It was cute, and enjoyable, but ended up being the same old thing. My favorite character was the Prince. It was hilarious watching him riding the back of a double-decker bus and stabbing it, thinking it was a dragon. And then seeing his reaction to (and enjoyment of) soap operas.
3. Atonement. There were some interesting things about it, but for the most part...eh. It was pretty slow, and boring, and it seemed that just as they got to an interesting part, the setting would change. But the ending was what really aggravated me. It basically nullified the last 45 minutes of the movie, and made me wonder why they dragged us through all of it. The best part of the movie was the music: the one memorable track incorporated the sound of key clicking on a typewriter.
4. The Orphanage. A Spanish horror movie about a woman who goes back to the orphanage she was raised in as a child. She brings along her husband and adopted son, and plans to reopen it. Not long into the movie, the son goes missing and the rest is a hunt to try to find him, with the help of the "supernatural" along the way. There was probably not one original thing in this movie, but it was still a solid scare.
5. Cloverfield. The movie I'd been waiting for. And I wasn't disappointed. This is the movie to see, though be sure to take some dramamine first. A monster attacks NYC, and the whole thing is filmed as if it were a home movie. Think Blair Witch. It made me dizzy afterward, but it was so worth it, because it really pulled me in. When we stopped downtown later on that night, I looked at the buildings and half-expected to see the thing ransacking Lafayette.

Books:
I gave up on all those YA books I was reading. I just suddenly wasn't interested in any of them anymore. And I have so many others to read. Like:
1. Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. A college student quits school, runs away, and jumps a train...which turns out to be the Benzini Bros Most Spectacular Show on Earth....or something or other. It was a great read, and gave interesting insight as to how circuses function (at least during the Depression). The elephant, when finally making an appearance, makes the book. She's clever and endearing, and toward the end, I found myself pleading that nothing bad was going to happen to her.
2. Finished listening to The Other Woman by Jane Green. The story was ok. I think the thing I liked most about it was the British lady's voice.
3. As mentioned above, I started Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything across Italy, India, and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert. A memoir about the author's struggle to divorce her husband, get rid of her push-pull boyfriend, and get away from "real life" and the U.S. in order to figure out who she is and what she needs. I'm really glad I got this on audiobook. The author  reads her own adventures and and puts her heart into it like only she can.
4. I must be in the mood for memoirs lately because I also picked up Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood by Koren Zailckas. It recounts the author's days of getting, well...smashed. She spends nearly ten years of her life (starting at about age 14) getting wasted every chance she gets in order to help her cope with the difficulties of life. She's a fairly good writer, but I'm not sure that I agree with her claim that she's not and never was an alcoholic. Getting drunk 4-5 days a week in college sounds alcoholic to me. Just about done with this one.
5. I'm about half-way through The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo. It's about a young boy's spiritual journey  through Egypt to find out what he's supposed to do with his life. I'm not sure if I'm crazy about it, but that may be the translator's fault. Although I guess it's not supposed to be heavy with characterization, plot, and description. I'll have to wait and see what happens.

As a final note, my one adviser did tell me that the third most depressed people in the world are graduate students. Preceded by post-docs at second, and Arctic farmers at first--who, at certain times of the year, experience days that only have about 2 hours of sunlight. Well, I say to that, at least they're spared the difficulties of spatial reasoning.

Current Mood: determined

I'm not really sure where Christmas went.
And it was pretty low-key. We stayed at my uncle Philip's because my grandma (who I usually stay with) had no room. It was fun though; my cousins always get so excited when we're over. We watched them open presents Christmas morning, which made me feel old...and quite behind the times. They got several Wii games, DS games, and a PlayStation 3. Then my aunt and uncle did a very clever thing. There was a huge box behind the tree that he had told the kids was an elliptical machine for my grandma. After they opened everything, he told them it was time to put grandma's present in the car. So he had them all surround it and pull up on the box...but it turned out the box was only a cover, so when they lifted it, the cover came off and revealed a big HDTV. The kids were screaming (their TV broke about a month ago and they had gone without one for quite a while).
I ended up getting mostly money/gift cards, a few articles of clothing, some jewelry, and a couple of PS2 games (yeah, way behind the times) that I requested from Derek. I got him BioShock, which is supposed to be outstanding, but apparently his computer is not up-to-date enough to play it >P  (And that's why I'll never switch to PC games).

And now the new year approaches.
New Year's is actually one of my favorite holidays. I'm not sure why. I have had some really fun ones in the past, and I love fireworks....but it may have something to do with it being a "saving grace" after Christmas is over. Christmas has so much build-up associated with it that if another holiday didn't follow shortly, its end would be more depressing. And New Year's keeps that from happening. And it's the one holiday we always to at my parents' house...so the party always comes to us. And I'm pretty excited.

And here's what's being going on entertainment-wise:
Movies:
1. P.S. I Love You. A girly movie about a woman whose husband dies from a malignant brain tumor and leaves her a year's worth of letters and surprises to help her get through life without him. I read the book, which was ok, and had no desire to see this movie (especially since Hilary Swank plays the lead and she's not really a girly-type person.) But my friend Liz came in from Houston and we were looking for something to do so we agreed on this. It actually wasn't as bad as I thought it would be--although Rotten Tomatoes gave it 20%.
2. Team America: World Police. An animated claymation/puppet like spoof of action hero movies. A couple weeks ago, we watched This Film is Not Yet Rated, and they talked about this movie on there and showed clips from the unrated version. My Netflix account showed we could watch the unrated version instantly, so we did. Only it wasn't the unrated version. Annoying. Anyway, it was pretty crass, but also funny at times. My favorite was the theme song: America! Fuck yeah! Comin' around to save the motherfucking day, yeah!
3. This Film is Not Yet Rated. A documentary of the movie rating system where the MPAA is trashed and the secret raters' identities are revealed through the director's detective work. Basically I found that it was about a bunch of directors who were pissed off because their crude films received an NC-17 rating as opposed to an R. Which led me to one conclusion: they were mad because their films wouldn't make as much money. Pretty lame.
4. Spellbound. A documentary about spelling bees. It was nominated for an Academy Award several years ago, but I wasn't that impressed. I think spelling bees are stupid though. English spelling can be so arbitrary and it's based on the input of several different languages, so rules can only take you so far. A lot of it comes down to rote memorization and the luck of getting a word that you've studied. And oh the drama! of being a kid involved in one of these things. Pushy parents, free time spent learning words instead of being a kid.... No thanks.
5. Highlander. Derek made me watch this. And I CANNOT believe that he gives me crap about the movies I like! Whatever you say, Jack. You're the master race. Blah!

The next one we're looking forward to is Cloverfield. It'll probably be silly, but after the movies I've seen this past month, I don't think it can be worse.

Books:
1. Finished The Glass Castle. One of the best books I've read in a long time. An engaging memoir.
2. Read the famous A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle. I thought it was pretty awful. Cliche writing, a boring storyline, and a contrived ending do not make a good book. I can't believe this won awards.
3. Started Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. It's about a college guy who runs away from home and hops a random, passing train...that turns out to be  a circus train. It's been kind of slow, but looks like it may pick up speed soon.
4. Stared the YA Abarat by Clive Barker. Can't really tell where it's going yet, but it's a typical "unhappy girl runs away from home and finds magic and adventure." It's entertaining so far.
5. Another YA called  Undine.  Another real-world-meets-magic where strange events start happening to a high school girl. It reminds me so much of the stuff I used to read and love when I was a young adult, and I'm enjoying it.

Current Mood: excited

So I finished all my Christmas shopping last week, and I think I managed to find things that everyone would want. I'm very excited to see their reactions when they open their gifts (moreso than I am to get my own gifts...I requested money so I can pay off my credit cards that I used to charge everyone's gifts X^D How's that for The Gift of the Magi?).
Anyway, Christmas seems to get less and less exciting each year. The traffic makes me insane. I no longer have a "Christmas break"  since the dissertation is in progress (I'd stop work on it for a week,  but it would only hang over my head so that I couldn't  enjoy myself. See Matt Groening's cartoon "Lesson 19: Grad School--Some People Never Learn.") There's no longer time to do fun things we used to, like building gingerbread houses and such.
And the movies have been disappointing, too. Take this year, for example. We went to see The Golden Compass, which, while moderately true to the book, has a pretty dark story. The movie was dark as well. But that's not the problem...it just wasn't exciting for me. It lacked the awe and  sense of wonder that I like my Christmas-time movies to have. And the fact that the movie didn't include the ending that Pullman wrote for the book... If you've read the book, you know what I'm talking about. The final scene is so intense and basically leaves you wanting to pick up the next book right away because you have to see what happens. Yeah, that intensity is gone from the ending when they didn't include the cliffhanger. I can understand the reasons they wouldn't include it, but I felt as though the movie was selling out. And that was a bummer.
Then we followed that up with I Am Legend, which was a big disappointment. Up until now, I've never disliked a Will Smith movie (even I, Robot). This movie is depressing, generally uninteresting, and unsatisfying. The zombies look awful; they have been reduced to fakey computer-generated beings that over-extend their jaws when they scream at the camera (which is all they do). Boring. Plus, from what I understand, the movie's end is very different from the end of the short story, and therefore eliminates the whole significance of the title I Am Legend, whose meaning ends up becoming ironic, and somewhat twisted, by the end of the short story. Another sell-out.
So what does that leave us with? Sweeney Todd, which I guess will be the standard Tim Burton dark/horror Christmas movie. Enchanted, which I don't think you'll be able to drag any male to see. National Treasure 2, which may be our best bet for fun. And a slew of other movies that I can't even remember the names for, let alone unearth some hidden desire to sit through. What's that Tom Hanks/Julia Roberts political movie called again? Oh wait, they're doing "Southern" accents again? Nevermind, I think I'll save myself some pain and jab my eyeballs out with a fork instead. Ditto for Fred Claus and Alvin and the Chipmunks.
So no magical Harry Potter, no inspirational Narnia, no epic Lord of the Rings....not even a silly Night at the Museum (which was our mediocre Christmas movie last year --there was no way in hell I was going to see Deck the Halls).

Hopefully I'll find joy in my books instead.
I finished A Secret Atlas. It was about average. There are a few interesting events, but I'm not sure they were enough to warrant me picking up the follow-up, Cartomancy.
Also finished Roger Zelazny's Nine Princes in Amber. It was solid, and above average, so I'll probably continue with the series. And the books are short enough that I can probably zip through them. Next up is The Guns of Avalon.
Finished the first book in Salvatore's Crimson Shadow trilogy, The Sword of Bedwyr. Also above average, but lacking something that I can't quite put my finger on. Onward to Luthien's Gamble.
I'm still working on The Glass Castle, which is a real page turner and very hard for me to put down. It's another short one, so hopefully it'll be out of the way soon.
And I'm trying out C.S. Friedman's Black Sun Rising, at the recommendation of a friend, who said it was classic fantasy, but very dark. So far so good.

Now I'm off to get some exercise. The last time I played racquetball (months ago) I managed to beat Derek. I imagine I won't get anywhere close to that today.

Current Mood: hopeful

On a brighter note, I've been plenty entertained lately.

We've been to see a few movies:
1. Michael Clayton: this was a while back, but I feel the need to put down my thoughts about it: BORING! Next!
2. Beowulf was weird. First of all, that movie should not be rated PG-13. It should be R. Nothing but nudity, sex, and people getting their heads bitten off. Yes, it's animated, but that will not hold as an excuse in this case. Oh, and it wasn't that great. The characters were shallow (and their faces were a little...off, the plot was nothing new (in fact, it strayed pretty far from the original story), and at times it was just downright ridiculous. 3. No Country for Old Men: the first 80% of this movie was incredible. But then the last 20 made me feel like that 80 was a complete waste. The movie basically has no end. In fact, during the last scene, my mind started to drift. This is how it went:
TLJ character: Blah blah blah blah blah....
ROLL CREDITS
ME: Huh? What just happened?
Yeah, that part sucked.

And I've watched a ton of stuff at home. Let's see...The Godfather (great), Brokeback Mountain (boring), Uzumaki (typical crazy Japanese horror movie), Suspiria (blah), a bunch of overrated Hitchcock, Dr. Strangelove (great), Dead Silence (not as bad as I thought it'd be), A History of Violence (great). And that's all the memorable ones.
And now I'm into The Office. I've only seen Seaon 1 and the first disc of Season 2 so far, but my favorite episode is the "Health Care" one. The ice cream sandwich scene made me laugh so hard.

I finished all the books I mentioned I was reading in my last post, save for The Great Deluge.
1. Inda sucked all the way through; I won't be reading the follow-up.
2. Ender's Game was ok.
3. The Kite Runner was great (but it looks like we won't be able to say the same of the movie).
Uhhh...what else was I reading?
Oh yeah!
I finished listening to Middlesex. It turned out to be awesome! In fact, 3 weeks later, I still miss listening to it. Solid book, great work done by the author and narrator.

Since then, I have read and finished these:
1. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon: A mystery through the eyes of an autistic savant. Great book, but I'm glad it was short. I don't think I could take the narrator for 300+ pages.
2. A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon: The story of a man who's developing dementia and how he copes with  his wacky family. The dark humor was engaging, but too drawn out and somewhat depressing at times.

I have partially read these:
1. East of Eden by John Steinbeck. I made it to about Chapter 6, and was somewhat enjoying it. I plan to pick it up again at some point, but it wasn't what I was in the mood for at the time.
2. Two Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon. An action/adventure/fantasy about two wanderers who get caught up in a war. Got about halfway through, then had enough. His writing is pretentious and the characters are like cardboard. And plot...I'm not sure there was one.
3. Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austen Grossman. A book about Superheroes and villains, alternately told from both sides. I made it a few chapters in and enjoyed it, but I was feeling the pressure of my other books. May go back to it.
4. A Secret Atlas by Michael Stackpole. A fantasy about a family that's world-renowned for its ability to make very accurate and detailed maps. I'm about halfway through and still going, but I'm not really sure where it's going. There's quite a bit of political rumination going on (which I'm upset to see that a lot of fantasy writers are including in their stories) and I can't get into the current affairs of the world, but the individual character situations are decent. Not sure if it's pulling me in enough for me to read the follow-ups.
5. The Crimson Shadow trilogy by R.A. Salvatore. I was looking for a fun, action-packed, adventure-riddled politics-free fantasy, and this is as close as I've found in quite a while. And I've never read Salvatore, so I thought I'd give him a shot. I've barely made a dent in the book (it's a collection of all three books), but so far I'm pleased. I'll definitely keep going on.
6. The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls. A memoir of the author's life as a child with a drunk father and a very eccentric hippie-type mom. I'm not sure how much is true, but the girl has some crazy stuff happen to her. But true or not, it's entertaining.
7. Spatial Prepositions: A Case Study from French by Claude Vandeloise. Can't forget my dissertation-related stuff. It's interesting since I've studied French but never really thought about how its prepositions compared to the ones in English. But it's hard to read. It's taken me about an hour to read 20 pages. I have to keep going back over the same sentences. Maybe there'll be something interesting to say about it later on.

Now here's my audiobook list:
1. Life of Pi by Yann Martel. The story of a boy who gets shipwrecked with a tiger, though supposedly it's all allegorical. Well, I'm not impressed. I'm on disc 3, and I'm not excited about listening to more. I'll probably end up saving it for times when I'm doing mindless data analysis.
2. Lisey's Story by Stephen King. It's about a widow who is supposed to discover something about her dead husband as she cleans out his office, but one disc into it all I've heard are several flashbacks of the same scene from several different perspectives and way too much use of King's made-up word smucking. This may be a chore to get through. I put it aside for now.
3. The Other Woman by Jane Green. Every once in a while I need a girly book, and since this has a British narrator with a nice voice, I decided to give it a go. It's pure fluff, and somewhat irritating at times, but is the most tolerable of the three. And it requires little mental energy.
I miss Middlesex!

Current Mood: rushed

Ack! So my intention was to update soon, but I guess I didn't make it.
So let's see...
My aunt made it through her surgery to remove the cancer, and it seems to have gone well.
Thanksgiving was quite a bit different. I went to Austin and spent time with Derek's family. It was extremely quiet compared to my family's get-togethers. It was a nice trip on the whole: I got to see Austin (6th Street and the UT campus), I browsed 3 Half-Price Books (I am both happy and sad we don't have any here--I found all kinds of stuff but spent way too much money on books when I have stacks of unread ones already), and just getting away from Louisiana for a few days was reason enough to be glad.

Oh yeah, and I meant to mention in my last post that Dell sucks. Their computers suck, and their customer service is worse. Back around August, my then 4-month-old laptop suddenly crashed. I turned in on to find it telling me that it was deleting a bunch of files and then repairing some stuff (oh, automatic bullshit, I thought). Well, after it was done, it wouldn't restart. We tried different things for about an hour--nothing worked. I finally ended up doing a factory restore, but my computer hasn't worked the same since.
So I called Dell. The first guy was an asshat. I spent about half an hour with him talking to me like I was some dumbass. Then he said he'd put me through to his supervisor, but ended up dumping me back in the waiting line. The next guy was an idiot. We'd ask a question and he wouldn't say anything for about half a minute. Then we'd ask if he heard us and if he could answer the question and all he'd say was "yes." Then we'd ask "well?" and get nothing. After about 3 minutes of silence from him, we called back and spoke with someone else who might as well have been the same person. Then we tried the online help chat. It was a mess at first. Mostly pre-typed bullshit where we could tell the guy was probably trying to look up some word in his English dictionary while frantically shuffling through his Dell "How to Piss Our Customers Off but Make it Look Like We're Trying to Help Them" manual and keeping us on the line all the while. After about an hour of that, we finally got a "supervisor" on who agreed to send me a new hard drive. And they did, followed by a bill for $150 which I refused to pay. But my computer still doesn't work as well as it did before the crash, and I really don't think that they solved my problem. But whatever. I guess it's a case of "you get what you pay for."
I will never buy another Dell.

Next up, we have Louisiana roads. So far this year I have spent about $600 on my car -- most of which went to replacing tires because potholes are apparently magnetically charged to attract my car. I had my front two tires replaced in January, my back two replaced in July, and then another front replaced in September. After that last time, I decided to look into getting the state to pay for it. Went through all the trouble, and they denied my claim. Then the day before yesterday I hit some gash in the road by my house (that was unavoidable because it spanned the entire road -- and I was not going fast) and now it looks like I have another egg. I did get the road hazard insurance this time, so it shouldn't cost that much to replace it, but dammit, it's the principle of the thing. LOUISIANA, FIX YOUR FUCKING ROADS. AND DO IT RIGHT--DON'T FUCKING HALF-ASS IT BY DUMPING SOME SHIT IN THE HOLES THAT WASHES AWAY THE FIRST TIME IT RAINS!

And don't get me started on UPS, who delivered my mom's package to a completely wrong address, let someone sign for it whose name bore no relation whatsoever to my mom's, and then knew that they delivered it to the wrong address when my mom called to find out where her package was. The lady that signed for it denied doing so, and now my mom (and the Amazon seller) have to fill out claims so she can be reimbursed her $60.
Good grief.

Current Mood: aggravated

So it's been a while. Almost a whole year since my last post.
So a bit of what's been going on since I last posted:
-My mom had a brain tumor (benign) removed over the summer. The surgery went really well, but she's still recuperating as far as her eyesight goes.
-I taught my first class over the summer. In sum, too little money for too much work. But it was a good experience.
-My cousin Elaine is finally getting married next weekend. She and Brian bought a house and moved in about a week ago. It's pretty awesome. And for the area it's in and being newly renovated on the inside, they got an incredible deal on the price.
-Elaine, Brian, Derek and I skipped Mardi Gras to go camping in Flint Creek, MS. It was a sweet escape!
-I've made superb use of my Netflix account.
-I'm finally making progress on my dissertation.
-I've been having these awful pains in my head.
-I went to the Cognitive Science conference in Nashville (and came back exhausted).
But on the downside, my Aunt Robin has breast cancer. We won't find out the extent of it until she has some tests done.

So my plate has been quite full. My reading has suffered slightly.
I've read some pretty awful stuff ("The Mephisto Club" by Tess Geritsen, "Brimstone" by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child...yech!) But I've found some good stuff too. I listened to "A Thousand Splendid Suns" by Khaled Hosseini on audiobook. One of the best books I've ever "read."
Right now I'm juggling several:
1."Inda" by Sherwood Smith: I'm so disappointed. She was my favorite YA author as a kid, but this book (an adult fantasy) has close to nothing going for it. Complicated names paired with complicated titles across multiple languages makes it very hard to figure out who's who. The dialogue/dialects sometimes leave a lot of stuff for the reader to infer. There's been occasions where I can't figure out what's happening because of missing pronouns. And then there's hardly any action/adventure, which she's normally good a writing. The book might be salvageable if the story were actually interesting. Almost done, thank goodness.
2. "Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card: Several people have recommended that I read this book, so I finally picked it up. It's good, but not as deep as I thought it would be. I guess I was expecting more because of all the hype. Almost done with this one too.
3. "The Kite Runner" by Khaled Hosseini: After having Derek recommend it to me and having immensely enjoyed A Thousand Splendid Suns, I had to pick this up. It's quality writing with a great story and solid characters.
4. "The Great Deluge" by Douglas Brinkley: A nonfiction work on Hurricane Katrina. And it's engaging. Brinkley seems to leave no stone unturned in his account of the events. I can't begin to imagine the amount of research that went into that book.
5. "Digital Fortress" by Dan Brown: Derek picked it up, got about 30 pages into it, and said it was awful. I was curious, so I started reading it. Yeah, his style isn't very good. Cliche descriptions and shallow characters (think Barbie "stunning, like a model out of an Estee Lauder ad" and Ken ("strong jaw, chiseled features, but great sense of humor!" Blah!). The "look how much I know" descriptions where the author attempts to show off how much research he did. And the over-the-top character reactions that attempt to show how amazing some event is...that the author has come up with this original idea that is so out-of-this-world that the characters almost fall out of their chairs. Spare me.
6. I'm also listening to "Middlesex" by Jeffrey Eugenides: The book won the Pulitzer and the audiobook was also greatly acclaimed because of the narrator, Kristoffer Tabori. And they both do a great job, especially in the beginning, but the book starts to drag on after about 3 hours of listening. Tabori does his best to keep it lively and entertaining and Eugenides is a capable writer, but I'm not sure those things can save the story. So I'm taking a break from it...until my next long trip.

Current Mood: busy

Just in case you didn't know:
dating = free time/2
But it's perfectly ok with me since the guy I'm dating is like a breath of fresh air that's been long overdue. We're compatible, it's simple, and there's no bullshit (and he's teaching me racquetball!) Enough said.
As for what else has been going on:
Went to the Psychonomic's conference in Houston a few weekends ago. It was a good experience, despite the fact that downtown Houston can be pretty annoying. Six of us crammed into Brooke's car to go find a Mexican restaurant, which resulted in some aggravated, hungry people nearly 45 minutes later. We did happen to stumble upon a great place (Merido's) though with excellent food and $3.50 margaritas. Yum. And we spent most of our nights playing board games. Our final night there my dissertation advisor flipped me off, believe it or not.
Anyway, so much for that.
Thanksgiving weekend was a busy one. We began by celebrating Stacy's 21st birthday with dinner at an Italian restaurant in Metairie called Impastata's. We all had the 5-course dinner special that pretty much did me in. Then it was off to the Treasure Chest casino where the night became a flop. The casino was unimpressive, and I didn't have money to gamble. Thank goodness Stacy was bored and we left after about an hour.
Thanksgiving was the usual. We had our walk by the river, which is always rejuvenating for me.
Then that weekend we had a family reunion of sorts. My mom's cousins joined a bunch of us at my parents' house. I wasn't feeling very sociable, so I played Guitar Hero 2 with my cousins for pretty much the entire time.
I recently decided to put my computer programming experience on hiatus. The Houston trip set me back, and I got stuck on a nasty assignment that just wasn't worth the 10+ hours it looked like it would take to complete. And that was only the third-to-last one. Who knows though, maybe I'll keep reading the book and teach myself some more of it.
My next goal for school is to analyze the data from my new pilot experiment. It consists of rating objects on how "facy" they are. I only have 6 subjects to work with until about 3 weeks into the spring semester, so I'll have to make due I guess. But hopefully it'll be enough to allow me to write a proposal draft over the break.
Then, just because I don't have enough going on, I signed up for Netflix a while back. It's fabulous. I usually get my movies in a day or two, so it's pretty fast. So far I've seen:
Audition - bizarre, but entertaining
Alice in Wonderland (the musical that mirrored the books)
A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 (only because it was the only one I hadn't seen)
Ninja Scroll (so said the epitome of Japanese anime - it was ok)
Ice Age - pretty funny, had some great one-liners
The Break-Up - good, I was very impressed with how true-to-life the arguments were and how sensible the ending was.
Silent Hill - one of the worst movies I've ever seen
Scent of a Woman - boring
I think that's been about it.
In the movie theater, I saw Stranger Than Fiction. I'm not a big Will Ferrell fan, but he did well in this one. It was definitely enjoyable.
As for reading, I finished the 12th Series of Unfortunate Events book. It was the best one in a while. Looking forward to reading The End and being done with the whole thing, but I'm juggling 3 books right now so I need to finish something first.
If only things would just slow down.