cloakandswagger

When I first saw Little Vera, I had a prissy reaction to that soviette’s limited wardrobe, consisting only of a drab house dress and then dramatic eighties-fabulous party clothes. My thinking then was, ick, how unhygienic, a reflex reaction only mildly tempered by the professor’s discussion of how very ‘capitalist’ our wardrobes were – that the diversity and number outfits was a response to an artificial sense of normality. Somehow I’ve gone that route! Not for beautiful reasons, but essentially I have two outfits anymore. I put on my oxfords and my no-slip shoes and my apron for work – and then I come home and pull on a cotton dress, then a fleece vest, then a cardigan, then sweat pants, then mukluks. Beeteedubs, I have that selfsame cotton dress in six colors now, as of Christmas day. I am almost a cartoon crime-solving teen sleuth excepting the crime solving teen sleuth part. It’s comfy!

Braided my hair for the first time in years. Hairstyles (like outfits apparently) I just wear to death. For the past few years it’s been bun or nothing, but before that I always had it down, and before that braids a go-go. I mean always-always, with no chance of variation, until one day I do switch it up and there starts the trend for the next half-decade, haha. Maybe it’s plait time?

I am working on a fanmix, my first ever. Jeez! Sometimes I worry I might be regressing. Certainly becoming obsessed with Gossip Girl (ick, ack, uck, ock, eck, and sometimes yck) over the holiday isn’t helping. Nonetheless, I’m tens kinds of excited about Monday’s re-debut. It is sometimes ludicrous how much I invest into the relationships of fake people.

Dog and I just totally zagged through some untrodden snow. I’m really scared about driving in anymore – Pennsylvania’s brumal season just kind of started for-real-for-real, rather than just gripping onto an Irish dampness, and I almost had an accident after the first genuine snowfall – and I was starting to think that winter had been passed over for my favorite season, but tonight’s frolic knocked that question right out of my head. #runonsentenceparagraph

Inspired by bennybunny's selections on the topic, I thought I'd submit my own. My criterion isn't terribly articulate, but mostly, I picked the songs that ... oomph, they put me in a groove, in their groove, specifically, and for that reason have racked up major play counts by being such potent ditties. Accompanying videos under the cut. Without further ado:



( you can keep your black tongueCollapse )

FINISHED THAT GODDAMN WRITING SAMPLE. :D



now cue forever!sleep.

Thanksgiving was uneventful but lovely. My mother is the queen of boxed foods, and turkeyday did not disappoint. I left very early into the holidaying to nap at home, and woke up to mathematics (geometry!) and a pudgy dog demanding a walk. Did not write my personal statement, which needs doing. Desperately. (Tonight’s the night! #ineffectivemantras) I avoided going to my Uncle Mark’s cabin in the woods for a hippie-dippie end to the festivities, and I wonder if I ought to have, now. Apparently my dad and my brother killed it at darts, and dad came home (late) and assured me that I was missed by the generation of young bucks that had come. He’s gone tonight, too, but I … I really like it, actually, when I’m on my own. Don’t get me wrong. I do get a lot of doggish when-will-the-people-come-home feelings, but I also recharge during these nights alone.

My mood at work is disproportionately affected by how many coworkers greet me on my way inside.

/NEEDY

Funfact: my friend Amanda told me during a lovely catch-up phonecall that she was involved in a gay-rights event called Thanksgayving and everyone she'd talked to about it so far had asked her if it was the past tense of Thanksgiving. Glory be. Now, as the rest of this entry is mostly just for yours truly, a courteous lj-cut is called for. Behold!

( Curious cormorants watch the start of the Gatorman part of the La Jolla Roughwater Swim. Athletes swim 3 miles from La Jolla Cove to Scripps Pier and back. Cage divers confront a great white shark.Yala National park of Sri Lanka is best known for leopards, but of course very difficult to get them in action. Death valley averages just 1.58 inches of rainfall a year.Collapse )

Fifty pages of fundamental mathematics? Check, f-list. I need to read fifteen pages a day in order to get to the end of my GRE mathematics guide, that I might pass the test on December 6th. It’s been really pleasant so far, but then …

plastic_jaws: :P oh math
plastic_jaws: it’s so friendly in the beginning

So unfortunately true. I dread the moment I hit hardboiled algebra in the book. But still, this much progress in a single leap is encouraging! “Aren’t you utterly ignoring the practice sections?” Well. “And isn’t practice your arithmetic pitfall, isn’t it the part that really tests you?” Yes and yes, but it feels like a waste of time to notch the multiple-choice bubble beside ‘Commutative Property’ and ‘Zero divided by zero is undefined.’ As soon as I blow past the Neat Math Facts chapter, I’ll do it, promise! Oh, also, regarding the broken mattress inflation contraption: fixed through glorious superglue.

Man, I wish that Hell on Wheels was just ... better. I think I was envisioning Deadwood 2.0 (Plus One Train) when I saw the commercials, but it hasn't lived up to that expectation at all. I don't know how much longer I can subsist on bad TV.

Ganked from twissie:

Tina's Fabulous Winter Friending Meme

Work has been wonderful recently. (Here: italics without irony.) Louis Armstrong’s rendition of ‘La Vie En Rose’ walked me through a power-hour of cashiering a week ago; funnily, it’s those lovely old slow songs that get me through the high-stress moments the best, as if outer hubbub bows to Satchmo blues. In the subconscious attic: worries about gradschool to the tune of the Clash’s ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go,’ stuffed in a steamtrunk, but now hauled out into the fore and it’s a yes I said yes I will Yes, not resounding, but an affirmation all the same. Which means I need cobble together a sample and a letter of recommendation in the next two weeks, as well as swing the GRE’s. If I didn’t half-ass it, I’d never ass it at all. My father, after I told him, put on Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’ and we did, in a surprisingly apt succession of Bowie tunes, from ‘Changes’ to ‘Under Pressure’ to ‘John I’m Only Dancing’ to ‘Life on Mars?’ It was really lovely. We danced in the kitchen while the dog frantically jogged around us.

Then today I came home from work and found he’d totally rearranged my room, and exchanged my bed for the broken one in the garage, without my knowledge or permission. We’d argued about this before, but had not decided whether or not to do it, and frankly, territory and space and possession are perhaps my greatest vices – put in a vulgar phrase, don’t fuck with my shit. Dad was raking leaves outside when I discovered it, and I thought about how we’d argued, how my points (ever with a healthy amount of externality) were valid, and how this hadn’t mattered, and I thought, ‘How do I make him feel exactly how I feel right now?’ Which is childish, but as I said, this is my biggest vice, and though I am a slow-tempered girl I do have a temper, which, unfortunately, is all the larger for the infrequency of its appearances. I went into his bedroom and rearranged all the furniture for maximum inconvenience. Dad laughed when he saw it, and we discussed it reasonably … and then we discovered that in the otherwise innocent process of moving his things, I had knocked off a key piece of a $1200 inflation device for his bed, which, erm, broke.

Cue forever headdesk.