My resolution for the past, um, 10 years has been to track my reading/watching/etc. That’s why I’m on wordpress – it looked like it would be really easy to post periodic reading lists (and my thoughts on the j-dramz). Were the reading lists ever posted? No, and now I’ve already forgotten so much of what I’ve read over the past couple of years.
So, rereading Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, which is both ridiculously beautiful and American, and reading Laura Miller’s The Magician’s Book which, except for the quotes from Lewis, is just ridiculous. I am about 20 pages away from giving up on Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods. And I think that covers my current non-academic (aka fun) reading.
Sometimes migraines arrived unannounced. They swoop in with a bright flash of pain; one minute I am fine, and then suddenly my clothing hurts and spots are dancing in front of my eyes. Sometimes they develop from headaches – those are the ones I hate the most because I spend the day taking aspirin and waiting. Last night, I had a slight headache which stayed with me all day today. At 6:30, I looked at the clock and thought: this is going to be a migraine, but I have tickets. This is going to be a migraine, but, tickets! It was the waste of money, not the waste of opportunity that was bothering me; I don’t ever gamble, but this place still finds ways of stealing from me.
I am so glad I forced myself to get out the door and down to the House of Blues. It was an amazing show. I’m still feeling the concertglow, like afterglow, a physical feeling of remembered bliss. Not only was I ill, but although I love some of her singles (Prisoner of Love), I haven’t really been a fan of her persona: wide-eyed, sincere, more earnest than an idol singer and less fun. But, the show tonight was amazing. She strutted around in a sexy, torn up dress and silvery boots, keeping the energy level high. The guy standing behind me kept muttering ヒッキー, ヒッキー and sighing. I think he wanted to yell at the stage like everyone else, but was a little shy. She played quite a few songs off of This is the One, but mixed in some older ones. And she played “First Love.” It was definitely a sing along moment in the section I where I was standing. She sang with such warmth and feeling – the ability to sing something 10 years old as if was written yesterday, that’s the mark of true performer.
“First Love” in San Francisco – I’m sure all of the people I saw discreetly waving their camera phones around will have videos on youtube soon.
Based on what people have been uploading, Utada saved the sexy sparkles for Vegas. This is the Utada I expected:
It’s nice, but not thrilling. I don’t know if it was the energy from the crowd or a mid-tour high, but tonight was more than thrilling.
Even after seeing them live, I don’t know how “good” they are. My tendency to love bands w/ megane guitarists (even if they’re never seen) interferes w/ critical judgment. Which is good.
If it can’t be a rigorous investigation into how language is used, then it should be a complete fangirl forum. If I am asked “do you like Ulysses,” I think I will respond with an in depth analysis of how Stephen Dedalus, much like Gilbert in Pandora Hearts, moves from moe (early parts of Portrait of an Artist) to hetare (Ulysses). Was Young Stephen bullied because it was cute? Joyce never tells us, but I do think, based on Finnegans Wake, that JJ would probably find “hetare” to be a surprisingly useful word.
I usually don’t make new year’s resolutions because, much like Mary Poppins, I am practically perfect in every way; however, I do have some resolutions for 2010:
1. figure out the whole yarn over thing
2. finish Final Fantasy 4 (now that I think about it, that might have been my resolution for 2009)
Ok, so I just figured out how to use the extended desktop and it has made my life approx. 3 million times easier. I have notes up on one screen and my document on the other – why didn’t I buy a monitor last year? And why didn’t I know about this feature last night? Seriously, if I could have had my notes on Paracelsus up on one screen and my document on the other, it would have saved me about 2 hours.
(Yes, right now I am working on an epic romance between Paracelsus and Gene Tierney, who, despite Laura and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, is not as recognized as she should be.)
So far, aimless internet browsing is down from 4 hours a day to about an hour and a half. Seriously, 4 hours a day, 7 days a week, that’s like a second job. And now that I’ve cut back on the internet, I am only slightly behind on my work and not really, really, really, behind.
And one of my goals was to track my reading, but that hasn’t quite happened yet. This weekend, I have The White Tiger (reread), and The Meaning of Night, even though I gave up on my own faux-Victorian project.
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice: One of the problems I’m having with the genre class is that it seems like many of the books that are the most popular are not written to be read in the way that I am used to reading. I don’t read to “identify” with the main character and I don’t want to imagine myself as the main character. The Beekeeper’s Apprentice really only works if you can imagine yourself as Mary “Sue” Russell, adventuring with Sherlock Holmes. Not adventuring, romancing – the mystery plot is really just an afterthought since the focus of the book is on the Holmes/Russell relationship. Once I got over my annoyance at Mary’s perfection and the gratuitous Watson-bashing, it was a fun read; however, I’m not planning on reading any other books in the series.
My goal for the next two weeks is to cut my purposeless internet browsing from around 4 hours a day to 45 minutes. So far, so good – an extra hour and a half of sleep & time to make soup.
