I'm going away for the weekend. be back Tuesday or so. I'll be cross-country skiing for the first time. I hope I can walk afterwards.
I still have a cold, and it's pouring, and the last thing I feel like doing is doing laundry and packing and running errands...
perhaps I'll go back to bed instead.

ok, the google referrals are maybe a little self-indulgent, but this one is cool: "moscow looking for bi".

ooh, yesterday I got my "Today I feel: enchanted/disenchanted" mug from the angry little girls site.
very exciting.

what good is *!@#%!!! online banking if the site is always frigging down? grrr.
then, when I call my stupid bank, they put me on hold and blare announcements at me like:
"YOUR LIFE COULD BE SO MUCH EASIER IF YOU USED ONLINE BANKING! IT'S EASY! IT'S FUN! STOP WASTING OUR TIME! WHY ARE YOU CALLING US?"

Idle Chat
a list of 818 spare things to say in german.

well, I've sent away for my upgrade to X v. 10.1; we'll see if it shows up.
and then we'll have to see if it works.
any mac users out there have advice for me about OS X? Why have I not gotten it to run in friggin' "classic" mode?
hell, I'm just going to go back to 9.1.
Fonts, schmonts- what good are all those fonts if half my applications crash every 10 minutes? and 70 per cent of them won't work at all???
oh- except for the splendid and very very extravagant i-pod that I got from Santa. It requires X v. 10.1. which is why I'm pursuing the upgrade thing.
hee.

I'm catching a cold, or a flu, or something. It's making me incredibly crabby and spacy... everything's sort of slo-mo.

---

maybe I'm just a sap
but I highly recommend looking over the Year in Pictures on sfgate.com if you have a little extra time. Highlights include:
from March:
-Rudy Guiliani in tights and heels
-an underwater photo of a woman with her one year old daughter swimming in March in St. Petersburg, Russia
-the pet goose
from April:
-the rugby player with his shorts twisted around his knees (poor guy)
from May:
-Della Slade, 88, playing a mean kazoo for the Kozy Kookie Kitchen Krewe
-2000 naked people
from June:
-the golden retriever Chino, with his fishy friend Falstaff
-the protester in Barcelona who's licking the shield of a riot cop. sex-y.
from August:
-canine carts and sharks in the water
and lots of naked men and baby animals. what's that about?
the photo of the guy eating a frog is just too gross.


Nigel Hawthorne died yesterday.

I stayed up very late last night and installed OS X on my ibook... only to discover that the upgrade to 10.1 is not downloadable (what was I thinking, anyway? jeez.), and I only have until December 31st to find someone to print up the order thing for me. irritating.
even more irritating- I have the beginnings of a sore throat.
last night I was thoroughly annoyed by OS X, but today it's kinda growing on me. I still have questions galore. it'll take a while to figure some shit out. in the meantime it's pretty entertaining.
Daphne and Miriam are coming over later for cocktails and food, hurrray!
K. wanted to get Spike a present, but I suggested a big box of kitty litter and a mouse. (really, I'd love to get him a live mouse- I'm sure that's what he'd ask for if he could.)

Saturday morning. four days off! hurray!
where are the Loony Tunes?  I am suddenly craving Bugs Bunny cartoons.
there's only crap.
well, that's not true, "India Waves" is on- Indian music videos. they're pretty awesome, but I kinda wish they were subtitled. I can't for the life of me figure out what's going on.
I'm drinking truly delicious coffee that my big bro Chris sent from Old City Coffee in Philadelphia. I worked there a long time ago.
Chris, I swear I didn't open or look at anything else in the box, I just took the coffee out, since I knew it had to be in there...
mmmm, yum.

I definitely should NOT have had those two cups of coffee with dinner at 6. I'm still buzzing.
must find some chamomile tea.

here are two translations for the following Pushkin poem.
The first is from my textbook, where it says: "The close to literal translations are provided to help you understand the poem. They do not claim to convey the poetic content of the original."
(I'm substituting the french Vous and tu, so you get the picture)


Tu and Vous

A simple Vous by a heartfelt tu
She replaced in passing,
And all (my) happy dreams
She aroused in my enamored soul.

Before her pensively I stand;
I've not the strength to take my eyes off her.
I tell her: How dear you (vous) are!
And think: How I love you (tu)!


The second translation is by Mikhail Kneller. I hope he doesn't mind if I borrow it.
more of his translations of Pushkin's work can be found here.


The empty "you" for "thee"-- so mild,
By chance, she swapped in dialogue
And all the dreams that I've compiled
Within my loving soul evoked.
I stand before her very humbly,
To look aside -- I do not dare;
I say to her: "you" are so fair!
And gravely think: How much I love "thee!"

now, I'm not a Tolkien buff, and I haven't read all the books, nor am I running out to see the movie immediately, but this review kinda pissed me off. maybe it's just that it's 7 am and I'm grumbly.
sigh.
more coffee.

grr. blogger was down yesterday and ate a whole post.

---

Angry Little Girls!
Meet Kim, Angry Little Asian Girl, and her friends:
Wanda, fresh little soul sistah-
Deborah, disenchanted princess-
Maria, crazy little Latina-
Xyla, gloomy girl-
and Pat, a boy.
see the original videos! (realplayer required for the video, but there are other things on the page.) well worth the visit.  The LA Weekly said, "Far more successful is Lela Lee's Angry Little Asian Girl, a collection of shorts that views like a marker-drawn slide show in which the grade school heroine tackles racism, gender issues and stereotype with a blue tongue. Imagine South Park crossed with the comedic musings of Margaret Cho, and you'll get the picture."

"Writers Martin Amis Admires, and He Should Know"
by Michiko Kakutani

At his best Mr. Amis demonstrates an empathetic ability to communicate the feel- the texture, the weight, the tactile energy- of individual writers' work and to explain to the lay reader how these effects are achieved. He describes Anthony Burgess's "panoptic suavity, his chuckling insouciance, his word-perfect putdowns." He points out that Pritchett's "responsiveness to the quotidian is one of the reasons his stories seem formless." And he salutes "Augie March" for "its fantastic inclusiveness, its pluralism, its qualmless promiscuity": "in these pages," he writes, "the highest and the lowest mingle and hobnob in the vast democracy of Bellow's prose. Everything is in here, the crushed and the exalted and all the notches in between."

ah, a Saturday morning.
slept in.  woke up with the usual attempt at oblivion laced with the inevitable panic that comes as you wake up gradually and realize how much you have to do and how damn short the weekend is.
omelettes with gruyere, coffee, a tangerine.
listening to NPR and only being mildly annoyed by the jazzy christmas carols some woman is singing on "West Coast Live."  I'm hanging in there because Josh Kornbluth is supposed to be on the show today.
moved the pile of junk mail and other crap from one end of my desk to the other to make room for the pile of books and notebooks that will occupy the next 5 days before my final.  I need to come up with some better solutions for dealing with mail and other stuff on my desk... I'm always organizing by making piles and putting them somewhere to deal with later.  the later part never seems to happen.
so I haven't been posting a whole lot.  I need to try to finish my little semester, and then I'll have a few short weeks of carefree time before the next one starts.
I plan to see a whole lot of movies in those weeks.
of course, with my luck, nothing good will be playing.
Eli is coming to visit!
Maybe he'll join us on our annual holiday trek to the Buena Vista via cable car on Thursday.
hint, hint.

Went to see the Harry Potter movie after work. I wasn't really expecting to love it, so it wasn't a let-down or anything- but it is a bit like watching a superbly entertaining 2 1/2 hour Saturday morning cartoon... I'm glad I saw it on a big screen. I wish I'd gone to see it with kids. My inner 10 year old loved it, despite my grown-up disatisfaction.
Mostly the movie made me want to read the books- the movie feels empty, and I'll bet the books are a lot darker and more suspenseful.
It has all the classic elements of a great kid's story- sweet, likable kid (don't we all want to be likable, even when we're not?), with horrible, awful family, learns of real family or special abilities, or finds some other means of escape- Roald Dahl used this stuff an awful lot (James and the Giant Peach, Matilda), as well as half the other books I read as a kid. Robin McKinley was one of my favorite authors, and I still don't see her books very often; it's a crime. "The Blue Sword" and "The Hero and the Crown" were so great, and "The Outlaws of Sherwood" is a very engaging retelling of "Robin Hood." Any kind of fairy tale-type story has always been my favorite. The Philip Pullman trilogy, "His Dark Materials" (very, very silly name) was pretty great, although he got really bogged down toward the end of the third one...

I've mentioned Powell's Books before- I just started getting their e-newsletter and have discovered-
Fup. store cat.

Found another Russian radio station today; alas, alas, my russian is still disappointingly inadequate. it's hard to figure out what the hell they're all about.
One thing is certain: the music I've found on it is terrible.
I love this banner, though- Russian cursive fonts are gorgeous:

"suddenly everything sucks".
behold the naked emperor microsoft, I say.
the original page got too much traffic.

and by the way- this week's cover of the New Yorker is so silly I was giggling on the train. The teenagers near me had too much dignity and thought I was crazy.

and- "Art Imitates Life".

I read this description of Narcissistic Personality Disorder on the Rabbit Blog, and immediately thought of someone I know.
I didn't want to be too harsh, so I carefully reviewed all 9 points- to be fair, she doesn't match up with more than 7 or 8. but it's scary to have someone's behavior so well summarized.

on a more positive note, I just had the yummiest sushi I've ever eaten.

I rediscovered jish.nu recently- and while I love to read other people's blogs, some days I find it really alarming. it's like having lots of imaginary friends. I'm not opposed to the idea of having, oh, maybe one or two imaginary friends, but really, more than that and I worry that I don't get out enough.

If I were a work of art, I would be Salvador Dali's Persistence of Memory. I am a surreal landscape composed of several disjointed and bizarre components. I like to keep an eye on the time, although the very concept is fluid for me. People are never sure what they are seeing when they look at me. Which work of art would you be? The Art Test

once upon a time:

today is December, i feel like crap and it's raining like you wouldn't believe.