Craziness.

An Admissions Timeline:

12/12
3:00 PM: Return from Tahoe and start working
9:00 PM: Plug in ipod to laptop. Laptop freezes.
9:03 PM: Laptop will not unfreeze.
9:09 PM: Laptop is shut down. Laptop will not start up again.
9:30 PM: Laptop has miracle revival. I backup all admissions files.

12/13
10:00 AM: Roomates pack. I leave for work.
12:00 PM: Anxiety attack. Return home from work.
1:00 PM: Busily playing Kameo on the X-Box.
4:40 PM: Laptop will not turn on. Laptop has OFFICIALLY DIED.
5:00 PM: Use Jason's spare laptop. But will not connect to my printer.
5:10 PM: Will not connect to Jason's printer.
5:30 PM: Jason's desktop DOES NOT HAVE A WORD PROCESSING PROGRAM! Conclusion: out of four computers and two printers in the house, it is impossible for me to print out my writing sample.
7:00 PM: Editing writing sample based on Rovee's notes.
11:30 PM: Print out writing sample at my Uncle's house.
12:30 PM: Head for FedEx Kinkos.
1:00 AM: Spent $60 sending applications to Berkeley, Penn, and Rutgers

12/14
9:30 AM: I wake up and go to Jason's computer to email IHUM to say that I won't be coming in.
10:00 AM: Application #1 sent in (online).
10:30 AM: Application #2 sent in.
11:00 AM: Application #3 sent in.
11:30 AM: Application #4 sent in.
11:45 AM: Realize that UWisconsin's due date is also the 15th!!!
12:00 PM: I look at my writing sample as I put it into an envelope, and realize there is a MISPLACED COMMA IN MY FIRST SENTENCE!!!
12:01 PM: I freak out.
12:01:30 PM: I call Elizabeth to see if she thinks FedEx will let me get back into my mailing to eliminate evil comma.
12:30 PM: Leave Partridge and drive to California Ave.
12:45 PM: Can't find parking spot anywhere. Have car-driving anxiety attack.
12:58 PM: Pull over to the side of the road.
1:00 PM: Low point of the day. Sitting on sidewalk sobbing as passerby stare. One woman asks if I'm all right, to which I look up and smile and say, "oh, I'm fine. Don't worry."
1:10 PM: EXTREMELY NICE old man lets me do what most be the most anal-retentive thing I've ever done, finding the FedEx envelopes to be sent out and opening them up for me, letting me white-out the offending comma in the three writing samples.
1:11 PM: He helps another customer as I work on this.
1:12 PM: He looks at me as I finish and asks how i'm doing. "Doing all right?"
1:17 PM: FedExes successfully taken care of. Make copies of writing sample for next batch. . .

12/15
12:30 PM: I give in and call ETS to get my Literature GRE scores. Horrible tension: Will my scores be abysmal? Will I remember my SSN? Will someone from work walk in my office at the critical moment? Will my cell reception cut out right after I enter my credit card #?
12:31 PM: The recorded message drones on and my hands start shaking.
12:32 PM: I get my scores! And they are. . . good? Bad? All of a sudden it all becomes relative and I start googling "literature gre scores" to figure out if they're good or not. According to the UCSB website, they take people with a percentage over 85. . . right about where I am. . . I guess it's decent then. . . I try to calm down.
12:37 PM: Since I have no work to do and everyone's in a meeting, I start posting on my blog.

Sorry, this has got to be the most boring post ever to anyone but me. But I don't really think anyone reads my posts anyway.

i'm not coming out. . . till this is all over. . . la la la. . . and we'll become. . . cigarettes when our bodies finally go!

http://www.weirdfortunecookies.com/f_starship_ride.htm

and, what I want for christmas:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0007Y08LK/qid=1133979296/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-1595432-8411302?n=507846&s=dvd&v=glance

I like Marie's habit of listing her current obsessions, so I think I'm going to do a bit of that today:

Current Obsessions (preoccupations?):

The Smiths
Gatorade
PG Tips
Gray (in clothing)
My $30 puffy 'fur'-trimmed hood coat from Costco
Keira Knightley
Stuffed penguins
Warm, snuggly shoes, sweaters, mittens, i.e. EVERYTHING
Sun chips
The Facebook
My new reorganized closet
Cucumber
Villanelles


On another topic, i've been researching the Faculty at the various grad schools where I am going to apply, and I am noticing, rather politically in-correctly, that 1) Almost all black faculty do African-American literature; 2) White people rarely do African-American literature; 3) Almost all people with funny sounding non-European names do Post-Colonial literature. I mean, right, this hardly comes as a surprise, but I find it interesting that 1) these areas aren't more diverse; and 2) As a white American I'm kind of afraid to ever make any kind of comment on either area of literature, which may be the case with a lot of other young white literary scholars, which may be why we all end up doing like, modernism (guys) or Romantics and Jane Austen (girls). Post-colonial, especially, can be a really delicate area to comment on, to my experience. I suppose, however, it's also currently more innovative, which may mean it's a smart place to be right now. Anyway. I overgeneralize.

I just had this dream that I slept with my Arthurian Literature professor. Which is kind of a random thing to pop into my head, since I haven't seen him in two years, but I guess there's no accounting for what goes on in one's head. The worst part, though, was when I woke up, since I was 1) disappointed that I hadn't actually slept with him, since apparently (in the dream) it had been pretty good; and 2) disappointed that Arthurian Literature was a long-passed memory and now I have to do stupid things with my time like work for IHUM for money (new job, blegh) instead of going to class and listening to stories about King Arthur.

If anyone has an idea of a FUN job that I could do, or at least a NON-ADMIN job (anything!), please, don't hesitate to point it out!

oh for god's sake

I play world of warcraft so infrequently that whenever I do decide to play it it takes like three hours to update. Seriously, WTF? I'm starting to get really pissed off at my laptop in general, which is always slow, makes a horrid fan nose that drives me crazy, and can't seem to play world of warcraft properly, despite having all the correct memory and such and me having defragmented the hard drive. If it doesn't get things together I'm going to have to go watch the OC or fight Dan for the xbox.

Sorry this isn't much of an update. Took my test, my score will probably suck, now onto working on my writing sample and hoping that it will make up for all the major weaknesses of my application.

the old whore's diet gets me going in the morning

Ugh. It is now 7:16 am, and I must report to Santa Clara University by 8:30 to take the evil test on ALL LITERATURE, EVER, that I have been complaining about for weeks now. Daniel isn't even up to make me tea, as I've never seen him up before the highly reasonable hour of 10:30, and I'm not actually sure whether I've seen him up at 10:30, or just awake. So I must struggle though making tea myself, and hope I will still be alive come noon.

On the upside, studying for this evil test has made me realize I'd like to read some of the following which has not been fully explored:

More poems by John Donne
More poems by W.B. Yeats
A novel (or more than one!) by Edith Wharton
Nostromo, by Joseph Conrad

It has also made me realize that I don't want to read:

Anything by Willa Cather
Paradise Lost

And now a quick review of verse forms:

Rhyme Royal: Seven-line iambic pentameter stanza rhyming ababbcc
Ottava Rima: Eight line stanza rhyming abababcc
Terza Rima: A form invented by Dante for the Divine Comedy. Three-line stanzas with an interlocking rhyme scheme proceeding aba bcb cdc ded etc.
Spenserian: Nine-line stanza, the eight of which are iambic pentameter, and the final is iambic hexameter, an alexandrine. ababbcbcc.

And finally:

BLANK VERSE: is the one that is iambic pentameter
FREE VERSE: is the one that's just unrhymed verse in whateveramater

I don't know that tea is sufficiently 'old whore' for this morning.

eggs

i was trying to hard boil an egg, and this is the help i got when googling:

Today I have two examples of flawed thinking.


Example 1
I'd really like some new shoes/a new skirt/ a new dress, which might cost $70 - $100. Let's see, that's about one grad school application. Well, if I didn't apply to say, Yale, then I could buy a pair of those cute kitten-heels I saw at Nordstrom.

Example 2
What to do about constipation? Well, in Trainspotting, when Ewan McGregor tries to go off heroin, it makes him poop a lot. . . therefore, if I am constipated, I should become addicted to heroin, so then when I quit, I can poop.


They do make some sense, you know?

All I do these days is study for the GRE. I can't post about anything more interesting than that, sorry to say. Here's some of my current study list:

redoubtable--inspiring awe, fear; worthy of honor
truculence--agressiveness, ferocity
irascible--hot tempered
inveigle--to obtain/win over by flattery or artful talk
rancor--emnity, ill-will

did you know that spurious and specious mean basically the same thing?

isn't this so fascinating? well, it will all be over soon. I told my advisor about how I took a practice GRE and got 770 verbal, 460 quantitative, and he just laughed at me. and said i should probably try to aim for at least a 500 quantitative. but he also said if i'm lucky, they might just find it endearing.

music: i am now obsessed with the death cab for cutie song 'soul meets body,' and also postal service, 'we will become silhouettes.'

everybody with us??

So last night I had this dream that my teeth were falling out. Specifically the one by the front on my left, the pointy one. I wiggled it and realized that it was very loose, and then I told my mom, my teeth are falling out, and I wiggled it again, and it seriously was so lose it was about to fall right out. And then the one next to it got loose too. And I was just trying to reconcile myself to the fact that I would soon be toothless, imagining all the dental work I was in for, when I realized that this was ridiculous. You've got to be dreaming, I thought, and, it seems, I was.

I went to work today and told Jan about my dream, and she said, "You dream about teeth, and it means someone's going to die. It's happened to me loads of times."

And then the mail came, and an envelope came for the office coordinator, and Jan said, "What's this, a letter full of anthrax?"

I told her she was having a morbid day.

But I thought I'd check--are you all still alive out there?

Maia

the sea, the sea

It seems that Jason and Karen Sarah have gone away for the weekend, and Dan is ensconced in the Psych Department with his dissertation proposal, so it is rather quiet in Partridge this evening. I find it disconcerting when roommates disappear for the weekend without letting one know, but at the same time it's kind of a relief, because it means guaranteed sleep at night without two loud male roommates exuberantly playing video games.

I have nearly finished reading Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea, and I bring you a quotation:

Some kinds of obsession, of which being in love is one, paralyse the ordinary free-wheeling of the mind, its natural open interested curious mode of being, which is sometimes persuasively defined as rationality. I was sane enough to know that I was in a state of total obsession and that I could only think, over and over again, certain agonizing thoughts, could only run continually along the same rat-paths of fantasy and intent. But I was not sane enough to interrupt this mechanical movement or even desire to do so. . .

work

So, one of the jobs Jan and I have at the Humanities Center is to take pictures of all the new fellows who come in. Most of them are the usual academic sorts--you know, varying degrees of attractiveness and sociability, a degree of arrogance, some friendly cute old people, some young or awkward grad students. . . but then, there is the Classics Man.

"Oh my God," says Jan as I walk in this morning, "I just took the picture of this new Fellow, and he was so hot. You know how someone is so hot that you know if you look them in the eye you'll just. . ." she giggles illustratively.

I laugh at her.

She continues on with the story:

Jan (gives him new fellow's packet, which includes a sheet to fill about about contact info): "If you could fill this out for me please, that would be great."

Classics Man: "Er, actually, I'd rather not fill that out, because I have a stalker."

Jan: "Oh, right. No problem then."


Maybe, suggests Jan, we should stalk him too, and await smiling in his office for him to come to work. "Good morning, ---," Jan suggests we say. "I'm wearing blue panties today."

sick?

I think I'm getting sick. I don't feel that bad, except that I can hardly talk. . . you know how that is when you wake up in the morning, thinking everything is more or less fine, and then you open your mouth and nothing comes out?

The highlight of the weekend was the stop to Cost Plus on the way back from an excursion to Half Moon Bay for firewood with Jason, Dan, and Karen Sarah--who knew they had amazing jewelery? I think I've looked at it before, but it was really good this time, so I got two pairs of earrings, one amethyst colored and the other a dark green, which are like, two of my favorite colors for jewelery ever since I was fourteen. When I was fourteen I was in the design-dresses-for-fantasy-characters phase, and I went especially for the purples and greens as well.


Oh--in more important news, i talked to Rovee about where to apply to grad school, so i think the list is looking something like this:

Princeton (good people; rovee went there. the Bird will have to tell me how it is.)
Penn (don't know that much about it, but it's on the east coast)
Berkeley (I want out of Calif!!)
Harvard (rovee says they're all full of themselves. but everyone says that. could i be full of myself too?)
UCLA (if i move to LA, I'm going to become a film director, not an english professor)
Virginia (i hear it's in the middle of nowhere?)
U of Colorado (Boulder) (sounds cool, but can't apply for PhD till have masters!! WTF???)
Indiana (Bloomington) (I think i slept through indiana. wait, did we drive through indiana? indiana??)
Michigan (Ann Arbor) (dunno. could be cool).
Wisconsin (Madison) (cold?)
Brown (don't know much about the program, but rhode island could be cool)
Rutgers (I don't even know where that is)
NYU (hm. is it a good program?)
UCSB (good? but again, cali problem)
UC Irvine (right. whatever.)

As you can see, I have some doubts.

And I really need to be working on the fucking things. ergh.

Maia

reviving

I've had this blog for awhile, as any reader can see from my first post (March?), but I didn't want to maintain it for awhile. . . but now that the great dispersal of friends has happened (is that a diaspora?), I like the idea that some people might be curious enough about how I'm doing to occasionally take a look at my blog. Also, I am jealous of Marie and her excellent blog, hence starting my own blog on the same website. Livejournal, I have decided, is irritating.

My roommates et al (Dan, Jason, Karen Sarah, Dan's sister, and Dan's sister's boyfriend) have gone on a road trip to Las Vegas for the weekend, and so I am using the opportunity of having the house to myself to play four Hilary Duff songs loudly on repeat! I swear, I don't know how I can admit this, but I think her song Come Clean is one of my absolutely favorite songs ever. Anyway, I would be far too embarrassed to play loud bad pop music if there were any human beings in the vicinity. . . but I think I do miss out on a large degree of fun.

I'm surprised I'm still up, because I was really tired today. I got up extra early (7 am) this morning to open up the Humanities Center since Jan, the other temp person there who is actually supposed to be at the front desk, had to go have her TB test checked. I fail to understand why the Humanities Center needs to be open at 8 am. Who on Stanford campus does anything at 8 am? Oddly, however, I rather enjoyed unlocking all the doors and such this morning and making coffee. There was something comfortingly routine about it, which I haven't experienced in a long time. I also felt more like myself today than I have in awhile. Maybe it was because I actually dressed like myself for once, and didn't limit myself to extremely boring work clothes. I was wearing that amazing turquoise/blue skirt I got at Urban Outfitters in DC, my mint green wrap sweater that Corinne got me at the Gap last December, over an ancient once-white Banana Republic knit top, with my silver/feather icicle earrings, and J. Crew boots for which I was charged L20 in taxes when my mom bought them for me and sent them to Oxford. And of course my BRIGHT RED hair.

Work was ordinary. . . I spent a lot of time writing email and occasionally doing something 'productive.' Jan tried to tell me about the history of the area she's from in Scotland, but I seriously was going to fall asleep. I was very sleepy all day. Oh, but what was great is that she's brought in a huge bar of Cadbury chocolate, and so in the afternoon when we get too bored she breaks off a strip of it for each of us and we stick it in our tea and let it melt before eating it. Sooo good. Oh, and then at lunch we started "movie lunch," which is apparently a Humanities Center tradition, and watched half of Roman Holiday.

Ran into Brad, a former TA of mine who is one of John Bender's advisee's, at Tres Ex after work. He's been doing work at the Humanities Center too, and we've kind of ran into each other variously over the past few months but always slightly confused about why we look familiar to each other, and so we sorted that out and hopefully he can help me with some advice about grad schools, since he does 18th century and such. Anyway, since I don't know many English grad students it will be good to talk to him, and he promised to stop and chat the next time he passes by the front desk.

Went home, studied for the GREs, watched the roommates run around packing. . . and now, Hilary Duff at top volume.

You know, this post is so trivial and self-centered. It's fantastic.

Maia

Wimbledon

I just watched the movie Wimbledon, and it was so cute! I was afraid to watch a romantic comedy since I have become disillusioned with romance, but it was irresistible. Paul Bettany also has a fabulous accent.

Today I got up, checked my email, talked to a DRC person about housing, ate ice cream for breakfast and watched Basic Instinct (which we really might as well call porn if we define porn by its effect on the viewer), went to therapy, stopped by my high school (weird! weird! I didn't talk to anyone), went to Kafe Neo, talked to Brandon on my cell, got Greek fries and a Greek salad, and came home and ate it as I watched Wimbledon.

Song of the day: Boulevard of Broken Wonderwalls.
No, I did not make that up. I heard it on the radio.

I finally finished my last paper for my Gothic independent study! Yay! Not my best paper ever, but written and turned in. I'm resentful about DVD case of Portrait of a Lady, however. It bit me a couple days ago. My fingers still hurt.

Oh, and in bookland, I finished reading The Awakening. The ending kind of jumped up on me. In some ways the story was very beautiful, and in some ways I'm not quite sure what I think of it. The best part, I would say, is the middle. When she is discovering things and moves out of her house. The setting is very vivid.

Claire says she has found my green jacket in her car! Thank goodness. I thought it had been lost for eternity, or at least until I called a whole lot of places to track it down.

My next project is my Critical Theory final. Hooray.