Whoo-hoo, 8 AM class canceled due to snow! *does a little dance in chair and watches some more Queen Seon Duk*

I'm just gonna take a moment here and ponder how long it's been since I did two posts in one day. Months!

So, I usually store up vid recs over a period of time, but recently, festivids happened, so I was going to do a special, Festivids-only post. But then I found some other vids I liked, so hey, here's a mostly-Festivids vid rec post with some other stuff thrown in.

( How many fandoms have I actually GOT here? *counts* Twelve! )

So, it's Friday. I spent my afternoon stressing about the Course of Study plan that was due today and, of course, I put off, because my New Year's Resolutions to be good and smart and on top of things rarely lasts past the first week of the year. I've sent it in, having gotten the thumbs up from my dad (have I mentioned lately how much I love my dad? 'Cause my dad is the bomb, seriously), and now, I'm done being productive. It's all young adult novels and fanfiction and Griddlers and YouTube videos from here on tonight.

The good and the bad of this week:
The good:
--In my History of the English language class, I got to read about Ivar the Boneless and his dad, Ragnar Shaggypants. Yes, Ragnar Shaggypants. They were Vikings, as you might have guessed--Ivar the Boneless spent a lot of time killing and conquering the English back in the day. Why was he called "Ivar the Boneless?" Good question! Maybe he was impotent, maybe it had to do with the whole snake thing his family had going on, but I watched a documentary on YouTube called "The Strangest Viking" that suggested he might have had Brittle bone disease, and honestly, I think that's a kind of cool idea. Supposedly, in the sagas, he's described as having gristle instead of bone and being carried into battle because he couldn't walk, so I think it's as plausible as any other explanation, and it's neat to think of a disabled fearsome Viking warlord.
--I have a bunch of awesome books from the library, including a pastoral romance and one of them big romantic epics the medieval and Renaissance times were so fond of, both written by women. I really want to read every single book in the University of Chicago's "The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe" series--it's all like 1500s feminism, and it makes me so freaking happy.
--I've been cooking up a storm, and all of it's been really good. I'm particularly fond of the chocolate-raspberry cookies and the quinoa-stuffed red bell peppers. (Yes, I know, I've got some bell pepper-haters in my circle of friends, but I found them quite tasty--my only complaint was that they wouldn't stand up in the oven, and I had to prop them in the corners of my baking pan.)
--Teaching French seems to be going a lot more smoothly this semester, at least so far. It helps that I'm not completely terrified all the time. This may seem like a silly thing to be bragging about, but it's amazing to me how easily I'm filling the fifty minutes. Last semester, it felt like I let my students out five minutes early all the goshdarned time, but now I'm actually managing to fill the whole class period, and it doesn't even feel like I'm trying harder or doing a lot more work. Part of it may be that, since my class is at 8:00 in the morning, I'm pretty much obliged to plan out my lessons the night or even the weekend before; part of it might be that I'm teaching in a "Smart classroom," which means that instead of just a blackboard, I get a computer hooked up to a projection screen so I can use Power Point presentations in class and stuff. Whatever it is, it feels really good. I'm really interested in seeing how well they do on their first quiz, which I'm giving on Monday.
--I really, really don't give a crap about the "Late-Night Wars," since I don't watch those late night TV shows, but I'm pretty amused by everybody dumping on Jay Leno and NBC. Heh.

The bad:
--The weather here was really pretty last week, but it got cold and rainy here again. Maybe I'll have to deal with some real winter after all. Poo.
--I was late for my History of the English Language class on Tuesday because I was trying to print out something for my Latin Textual Criticism class, and then the professor didn't even collect it. What a waste of time and stress.
--Sometimes I am struck by the terrible feeling that nobody here likes me. One tries not to be insecure about these things, but I sometimes feel like I screw up every single conversation or social interaction I have with anyone and everyone.
--I feel sick. I don't know if it's real, "You've got some virus or bacteria" sick, or "You haven't gotten enough sleep this week and you've eaten something that disagrees with you. Or too many beans" sick, but either way, my head and stomach and throat have felt a lot better.
--Politics makes me so freaking angry these days that I literally have to get up and run around the room sometimes, making imaginary speeches on C-SPAN. This latest big Supreme Court decision, the one where corporations can pour as much money as they like into the electoral process, makes me want to scream. Sometimes I want to defect from the world, or just form my own party, the "I give a shit about human life and happiness more than becoming a multi-billionaire" party.
--There was a big pain in the ass with my credit card today, which I don't even understand enough to go into. Meh, credit cards.

The...eh?
--Yeah, I think I'm going to do Bandom Big Bang again. I have no idea what's wrong with me.

Well. Okay. I think I've said everything I can think of.

Oh, wait! Meme.

1) I have made a list of 15 characters and assigned each character a number. I have a random mix of fandoms with which I think at least some of you should be familiar.

2) Without telling you who's on the list or the character's assigned number, I am taking questions about what you'd like to know about them. For example: why were 12 and 8 found chained together around a stop sign?

3) After everyone has responded, I will post the list and my answers.

Man, I suck at the whole LJ thing.

So anyway, classes started today--the ones I teach, not the ones I take. Those start tomorrow. I suppose it went well enough, though I was embarrassingly bad at operating the technology in my "Smart Classroom," and I uttered that immortal swear word "poop" while trying to adjust things, no doubt convincing my students that I'm some kind of goofy cartoon prude or something.

My last days of vacation were, well, less than vacation-y. My grandpa had an obstruction in his throat which was making it impossible for him to eat and causing him a lot of discomfort, so he went to the hospital and my dad went down to stay with him. The evil forces of Murphy's Law converged on Tuesday. In order of crappiness/importance: I was unable to find Jarvis Cocker's new CD in either Best Buy, Tracks, or TD's CD's or whatever that place is called. ==> Because of the weather, my mom informed me that we were driving back to North Carolina a whole day earlier than we had planned.==> Just as my dad was driving into town from my grandparents' in Illinois, we got a call from a dude at the Y: my brother had hurt his knee playing basketball, and it looked bad, so the Y dude was taking him to the hospital. All plans of a nice dinner and a relaxing last night in town were forgotten as we rushed to Prompt Care, played a fancy-pants game of Musical Cars, and made my dad utter a lot of sounds of angered exhaustion. All's well that ends well, though; my grandpa's doing a lot better, and Brendan has a sprained ACL, and though a veritable multitude of radiologists and an orthopedist were unsure at first, they now think that he has not fractured his kneecap. Which is good.

I've been cooking up a storm, and I'm excited/terrified about my classes tomorrow--I've got a full five and a half hours of them, which I really haven't had since high school. One of my classes is from five to eight in the evening--won't THAT be fun!

Since it's been a whole month since I posted the "guess what these song summaries are" meme, I thought I ought to post the unguessed ones: ( So, here's what these songs were--let's see if you agree with my summaries. )

With the end of one meme, there must inevitably come another: Here's this one I found floating around that marvelous series of tubes.

Ask me for my top 5 anything: fandoms, ice cream flavours, cartoon moments, women in my fandoms, OTPs, ideal holiday destinations, goals for the future, celebrity crushes, books I wish would be made into movies, love songs, ANYTHING.

And if you like, I'll ask you a top 5 in the comments!

So! Friends, LJers, countrymen/countrywomen/old movie lovers, anyone wanna come over to my swinging pad on Tuesday for Gary Cooper and Greta Garbo? Currently on my "to-watch" list are Queen Christina, which is about Greta Garbo the badass bisexual Swedish Queen and the man she loves, who inexplicably mistakes her for a dude, and Design for Living, which I wrote about here and which is about Gary Cooper and Fredric March and Miriam Hopkins and their art and, uh, their love triangle? Which ends in a completely awesome fashion?

Anyhoo, my dad's out of town, which means I get access to the bigscreen TV downstairs, so...any takers? This could be a dinner-involving event, if people are so inclined.

ETA: Say we were to eat dinner, for the sake of argument. Might we gather at my house at 6:00 or so to discuss our dinner plans?

Who finished their Yuletide fic and posted it with mere hours to go? This girl did! *does a little dance*

So, I survived another trip around the sun! Yay. I celebrated by waking up at 4:00 in the morning to turn a five-page final paper into a twenty-one-page paper. W00t! And then I celebrated by getting myself a North Carolina Driver's license. Sort of. I have a little piece of paper that says I have a driver's license while my actual license is in the mail, and I can only drive a rental car until I provide proof that I have car insurance, but I'm okay with that. I'm okay with a lot--though I still have to do my stupid pedagogy take home test and get my students' grades in, I've taken a big step towards getting everything done, which is nice.

So now I'm going to celebrate that by posting some fanvid recs.

( Being Human, Deadwood, NCIS, and other fandom vids below the cut. )

Happy Tuesday, folks.

1. Put your iPod on shuffle
2. DO NOT write down the lyrics of the first 15-20 songs to come up.
3. Describe what the song is about. Be creative.
4. Cross out the songs when your friends guess them in the comments.

( Under the cut: my versions of what some songs are about )

Well, that was fun. Took a little longer than I expected it to, though. And now I'm getting tired enough that I'm mixing up words like "to" and "too," which is unfortunate.

Howdy, folks. I've been pretty much absent on LJ recently, basically because I've been struggling to write my final papers of the semester and having a really hard time mustering up the mental fortitude to do anything more mentally taxing than playing FreeCell. It's really unfortunate, to tell you the truth, because I still have a final paper to write, a take-home test to do, a whole pile of grading, and a driver's test to take. (My driver's license expires on my birthday, and gosh darn it, I need a valid ID to fly home.) Plus, I'm still catching up from that time I woke up at three in the morning, tried to get back to sleep and failed, and spent the hours from about 4:00 to 9:30 writing a paper that was due at 11:00 that morning. Smart decisions: I'm not so good at making them.



I kept reloading this meme to see what else they'd stick my lj name in, and it actually got to the point where I ceased to recognize "Corpruga" as my lj name and started reading it as some word I didn't know the definition to. Such a strange sensation.

Hi, people. I have not been on the LJ for a few weeks. This is because I have spent those few weeks cringing away from my mountain of grading and final research projects I've been putting off all semester and generally avoiding absolutely everything except Korean TV shows featuring cross-dressing on YouTube. But I have random anecdotes for you! Which I will maybe type up later when I am less tired. (I have just come from a party. To go to this party, I had to NOT go to the Amanda Palmer concert for which I had bought a ticket, which made me tear my hair with woe, but the party itself was a lot of fun, and I'm glad I went.)

And now, a meme. ( A music meme, for verily, those are my favorites. )

Feeling terribly meh and unproductive. If I post about anything serious, I will just feel like a whiner--after all, the fault lies almost entirely with me and my unbelievable laziness, so instead I will post about my dreams and muffins.

Dreams:

I had a dream a night or two ago that I was sleeping on a folding lawn chair in the grocery store. I don't really know why, either. I think it was for some kind of retreat, but goboaj was there, too. Possibly an orchestra retreat? But Dakota was also there. After I got up from hanging out with Alex on our folding lounge chairs in the frozen meat and dairy section, I went to go take a shower. (There was a shower in the grocery store, too.) I was going to drop by the toiletries aisle first and get myself some shampoo, but then Dakota told me, "They have shampoo in the showers!" I seem to remember it was one of those showers that's in a glass box without a curtain, as opposed to the ones in your tub, so I sure hope it was made of frosted or otherwise opaque glass, seeing as how it was on the end of the chip and cracker aisle.

Last night I dreamed that my dad came to talk in my theory survey course, which was simultaneously awesome and hugely embarrassing, since my professor kept making a big deal about it. He was talking about the state of English departments or something. I then escaped to play slot machines in...the airport? I don't know, maybe there was an airport on campus, or a lodge or something. Maybe they weren't slot machines but pinball machines. Either way, at first they were spitting out dollar bills, which I thought was cool, but as I started winning bigger, they started giving me fake money and little tickets and tokens, which I could use to purchase Chinese finger traps and yo-yos and the like, just like we were in one of those video arcades.

Muffins:

I had fantastic luck with a boxed pumpkin quick bread mix to which I added cranberries and chopped apple to make the most autumn-y muffins ever. Elated with this early success, I went back for more pumpkin bread, but all I could find was apple cinnamon. Okay, I said. No problem. I'll just buy some canned pumpkin and add it.

The results? Well, the canned pumpkin made the muffins really heavy and wet, but that wasn't the biggest problem. The biggest problem was that I wasn't paying attention when I added the apple stuff that came with the apple quickbread mix, so I ended up adding that sugary stuff that people sometimes put on the top of muffins, with the end result that sometimes when I bite into them I get a big lump of mother-fricking sugar. As a corollary, they are way too freaking sweet. The analysis I gave to my mom went thus: pumpkin quick bread mix (sweet) + green apple chunks (tart) + cranberries (tart) = perfection! Green apple chunks (tart) + cranberries (tart) + apple cinnamon quick bread mix (sweet) + apple filling (sweet) + canned pumpkin (sweet) + freaking streusel topping (sweet) = vomit-inducingly sweet. These are the kind of muffins that could put one off muffins entirely. Well, I suppose you live and learn.

So, another Monday! Today's actually probably the worst part of my week (I hope!) since I had the first half of my pedagogy midterm this morning and a Latin paper due this afternoon. I got through both of them, though how good they are...eh, probably best not to think about it. Or about the bibliography for my Theory paper, which is due tomorrow. Whatever, yo! I'm not stressing about it--I've got some books from the library, I've got some articles saved on my computer, whatever, I can totally come up with twelve sources by tomorrow morning!

I am such a moron.

In other news, my body appears to be preparing for hibernation. No joke, I'm suddenly hungry all the time and tired all the time. Despite getting an average of eight hours of sleep a night last week and no less than seven on any given night, I went to bed at about 10:45 on Saturday night and didn't wake up until 10:00 Sunday morning. I told my dad that my body seemed to want to put on a layer of fat upon which it could feed while I curled up in a cave all winter, and the jist of his response was, "That sounds like a great idea!" So, if you hear word of my dad going missing, Bloomington folk, check out the local caves to see if he's gone into hibernation.

So, about a month ago I subscribed to Paste Magazine, and I chipped in the extra two bucks a month to be a "Paste VIP." They still haven't sent me a mother-fricking magazine in the mail, which frosts my cookies, because all I want to do is curl up with the magazine while I listen to the sampler, but whatever, Paste VIP gets me all these albums and whatnot from the Paste website, so I consider it money well spent. Mm, musics. So much of it out there, so little time for me to listen to it and think about it, but still, one of the best things ever.

ETA: WTF, YouTube? What about my viewing history makes you think I'd like a video called "Girl Burns Kitten Alive in Oven?" You are one sick freaking website.

So apparently yesterday was National Coming Out Day? I celebrated by forgetting all about it, cleaning my living room, and getting myself an AfterEllen account. At long last, I, too, can comment on posts about Rachel Maddow and Tegan and Sara, offering my opinion on such topics as "Top Ten Lesbian/Bi Sidekicks" and "Unsung Heroines, Part 2: More Queer Women Who Deserve Their Own Biopics." Score!

What a rainy, dreary, long Monday. Thank goodness it's over. Bring on Tuesday, that's what I say.

So today I dragged my million-pound backpack onto the T bus line and went out to watch Whip It. I'm not going to go into enough detail to spoil it, because I want everyone to go out and watch it, but I'm gonna tell you all right now, I really enjoyed it.. I mean, okay, in the first place, I'm a sucker for high school girl sports movies. I don't know, it's just one of those genres I enjoy, and not just because they're full of attractive women (who are invariably played by people older than high schoolers--I'm really not that sketchy) doing athletic things. I find the oft-repeated story of "underdog makes good" especially compelling when mixed with "young girl coming of age and kicking butt" stories. I'm also a big fan of the training montage.

All the above being true, and what with my being a big fan of both Drew Barrymore and Ellen Page, I was already well-disposed to like this movie. And it didn't at all disappoint. Cast? Great. Script? Great, and wittier in a subtler way than a lot of comedies. (I mean, I love a good one-liner as well as anyone, but there's something to be said for a more realistic mode of dialogue.) Soundtrack? Great. I found the characters really sympathetic and the plot really satisfying. And even besides all that, I think it's a really great example of a feminist movie, and you know I'm all over that. I walked out of the theater feeling great.

Favorite bits?
--Alia Shawkat as Ellen Page's best friend was awesome.
--The bit where Marcia Gay Harden mistakes some bongs for pretty vases.
--Any time at all when Kristen Wiig was dispensing words of wisdom.
--Juliette Lewis: best nemesis ever. Not only is she badass, but there's a lot of character and story there expressed in very few words.
--Daniel Stern! So glad he's still making movies.
--Oliver and Bliss' last scene.

So, yeah. There are my two cents.

I finished my Latin paper! Yay! It might suck, and it might be clogging up my professor's inbox because my e-mail was acting up and I accidentally sent it twice, but it's done!

Less yay: WTF is it with these Roman Polanski defenders? ( Upsetting discussion of the whole shebang, including the rape, under cut )

I spent most of my weekend being super fuzzy--I swear, I should have GO TO SLEEP, YOU MORON tattooed on one arm and IF YOU DON'T GO TO BED, YOU'LL FEEL LIKE CRAP tattooed on the other. But the eleven hours of sleep on Saturday night helped. Also, the workshop on Saturday was rockin'. I didn't particularly want to go, but we got free pizza and a professor from UT Austin taught us how to sing different Roman dramatic meters which, no joke, totally changed the way I look at Roman drama and also made me wish I wrote songs, because I'd love to incorporate some trochaic septenarii in a song. Or something. Now I wish I'd been recording it or something, because I'm kind of forgetting just what it sounded like. It was groovy, though.

Also groovy: I made home-made macaroni and cheese the other day from a recipe I found in People magazine. Embarrassingly enough, I think I still prefer the stuff that comes out of a Kraft box in the shape of Pokemon, but I have to admit, this stuff's pretty good, and as a bonus, it tastes like actual cheese. Also, I tried out this new soft sourdough bread I found at the grocery store, since I couldn't find rye, and it's also quite good. Yay, food.

I volunteered to work at a football game on Saturday. How bizarro is that? (Well, "volunteered" is perhaps a bit strong--I was asked to by the...I don't know what you'd call it, the English department graduate student club. It's a funding thing.) I wonder what I have to do. If it's give people directions, they've got the wrong person, since I still get lost all the time. Maybe it'll be to take tickets. I could probably do that.

Man, I can't wait for some semester when two of my three classes aren't required classes, so I could spend my days working on something about which I actually give the tiniest fraction of a crap.

But I'm not going to moan about today. I got through my pedagogy presentation--it was awful, and my mouth tasted terrible, and I think I did a horrible job, but at least it's over with, and now I can spend the rest of the semester watching other people give their presentations and chilling. And I gave my second quiz to my French class, and I think it went better than the first one, although I messed up the directions for one part and am thus going to have to grade it differently. Also, these students need to work on their dictation--I was reading with huge pauses between words, with such huge pauses between clauses that I see that a lot of people have actually written dependent clauses as separate sentences on their quizzes, and they still wanted me to talk more slowly. In my day, Ms. Knable played a freaking CD for our dictations, and we wrote as fast as the freaking CD talked--which was not the speed of an android running out of batteries. *shakes fist at the sky in impotent old lady indignation* Also, we had to walk uphill both ways to class through blizzards!

I had a few dreams lately, two of which I will now share. The first was kind of cool: President Obama and Neil Gaiman were somehow co-presidents (Yes, I know it doesn't make much sense, seeing as how Neil Gaiman's a British author and thus is as unlikely to want to become president as he is constitutionally prevented from attaining that particular office, but whatever, it was a dream in which Barack Obama and Neil Gaiman occasionally became the same person, so realism really wasn't much of a factor.) Anyway, Presidents Obama and Gaiman somehow...knew me? I was a neighbor or something? And occasionally they'd have me come over and babysit, which was cool because I got to say hi to Michelle Obama and Amanda Palmer and then sometimes President Obama/Gaiman would make cookies. (They were the same person at that point in the dream.)

The other dream was really sad and unsettling. I dreamed that my dad died, I think of a heart attack. For some reason in the dream, I liked to look at my dad's Wikipedia page (he had a Wikipedia page in this dream), but when he died, I closed that window, because I didn't want to see the page updated with the day he died. And then I hid my face in my mom's lap (I was back at my Bloomington house, and my mom was sitting on the purple chair in my family room) and cried, saying things like, "He said he had a few books left in him! He was going to write some more books!" When I woke up, I wasn't sure whether it had been a dream or not, so that was pretty miserable.

Not to be a whiner, but Mondays are the pits. I want more weekend.

Oh, man. Patrick Swayze died. I don't even know what to say! It's not like Patrick Swayze was ever one of those actors I obsessed over, but from his role as the motivational speaker in Donnie Darko to the "A Patrick Swayze Christmas" song on MST3K to watching Ghost with my mom and enduring a lifetime of her trying to convince me that he was hot, it feels like he's always been around, you know? That's the problem of celebrities--you don't know them, but you feel like you do, and it hurts when this happens. He was only 57, and he seemed like a nice guy. I feel sorry for his family.

So, Saturday has pretty much come and gone, as it does. It doesn't feel like I got much done, particularly when I think about what I still have to do, but I set up a meeting with the lady who runs the French teaching program to talk about when she observed my class yesterday (man, what a terrifying thing THAT was, but her evaluation wasn't that bad), and I met up with another French TA to write Quiz 2, and I translated some 130 lines of Latin (about a third of my translation for the weekend...*sob*), so really, I did okay for myself.

In other words, I feel completely justified in taking the time to put together a post of fanvid recs and whatnot.

( A small sampling of vids from Buffy, Merlin, 80s movies, etc. )

Okay, so that was a rather brief recs post, but I need to go to bed so I can get up tomorrow and do more Latin and organize my gradebook and whatnot.

Also! I got myself one of them new-fangled "Skype" contraptions. I'm--surprise surprise--Corpruga on there. I don't really know how it works, but it can't be that complicated, right?

So, do you ever do that thing where you vomit up a bunch of miserable emotions on people you care about, and then later go back and think, "...Wow. I said a lot of shitty stuff. I now feel the need to apologize not only to the direct victims of my outburst, but maybe the world at large, too?"

Yeah, I've done that, like, twice in two days. *Headdesk* For whatever reason, it's been a really stressful week for me, where things that, in the grand scheme of things, probably aren't that big a deal, have seemed overwhelming. I guess everyone has good days and bad days--sometimes, though, I know that I make my bad days worse, for me and for whomever I end up spewing all over (usually my parents) and I wish I'd stop doing that.

Well, that's quite enough of that. Here, have some pictures of my swingin' bachelor pad.

( It's a mess, but hey, it's home. )

Happy Friday, friends. Here's hoping for a good weekend and a good next week.