fenrisranger | Entries tagged with books

Bonus, I'm linking to the Wikipedia or Goodreads pages of all the books, because 1000% recommend all of the below.

Articles of the Federation by Keith R.A. DeCandido is one of the few media tie-in novels that I've read more than once, because though it only features cameos from your favorite characters, it's a really rich expansion of a part of the universe that is pretty much a black hole on screen: Star Trek meets The West Wing, basically. It's set in between Nemesis and the lead up to the reboot, and written by one of my favorite ST novel authors. It's really brilliant, and if you're interested in the broader Star Trek universe outside of ships and the military at all, here's a primer on the civilian political system hidden within a captivating novel.

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie was part of a colonialism theme in English class, and pretty much my entire introduction to anything having to do with Indian independence (like, the fact that it happened ? Hello, history classes, what the fuck.) So this was a world-broadening book, for sure, as this historical fiction/magical realism amalgamation required a decent bit of learning about the struggles of newly-independent India to understand both the political allegory and some of the actual plot events therein. Also, Rushdie is partial to the very stream-of-consciousness writing style that I use myself (I was looking over notes for a presentation I had to give on the novel to remind myself why I liked it, and actually had to Google this bit to see if he wrote it or I did; the only hit was my blog pointing it out seven years ago, though, ahaha), so his words flow in my brain like they belong.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez has such an interesting non-linear storytelling format that I was super inspired to try it out myself in some writing (which never actually came to fruition, but still). While other things will inspire me in an "oh, I want to fanfic this" way, this was unique in that the story ideas in my head were forming around this narrative technique rather than around characters or settings. I think I've put off my reread in the original Spanish for too long at this point to be able to do it without constant dictionarying, but it's still on my to-do list, and as it's a novella, it might be manageable.

Dark Passions by Susan Wright is another stand-out of the literally 100+ Star Trek books I've read (this is a two-parter, actually), but for less world-building and more "reads like a femslash fic" reasons. This one has everyone's favorite things: it's heavily dominated by powerful female characters, many of whom are queer, and ties the TNG and Voyager characters into the mirror universe established in the DS9 episodes. That's right: (even more) canon. mirror. universe. lesbians.

The Harry Potter series, because of the universe and the fandom and all the magic and memories that entails.

The Sherlock Holmes canon, also mostly for the fandom and the universe and all the fun that has come out of it. I'm one of the newish (though with Sherlock and Elementary, I suppose I'm from an older wave, now!) Holmes fans who saw 09!SH and immediately went home and read all the canon and watched the Granada series and dove straight in to classic fandom while waiting for everyone else to catch up. So even though this was a movie-inspired read, my love for the canonverse is no less strong (and stronger than that for BBC Sherlock, tbh, because I have massive love for Victorian England). Specifically, I love SCAN for Irene of course (here have some meta notes on it from ages ago), DYIN, 3GAR -- okay, the ones whose titles come to mind are just the gayest ones and not the ones with the best stories or anything, sorry not sorry.

The Hot Zone by Richard Preston is a thriller about a filovirus outbreak outside of DC; after a solid chunk of the book on Marburg and Ebola to make sure you're up to snuff on why exactly you should be fucking terrified, we track from patient (monkey) zero of how it got there and how it was contained and hidden from the general public to prevent panic. Oh, and did I mention it's nonfiction? The drama makes it almost novel-esque, though there's enough background on the history and evolution of filoviruses (though from 1995, so I'd need a reread to see if anything's dramatically off of what we've learned since then) via discussion of other Marburg and Ebola outbreaks to make this a solid straddler of the science-read/fun-read category.

Level 4: Virus Hunters of the CDC by McCormick, Horvitz, & Fisher-Hoch is of a similar vein, but more scientific and less dramatized; it's comprised of stories written by the scientists who actually work in the level 4 containment facilities with the incurable plagues. It's a great look inside the lab and was my first picture of medicine that wasn't straight up clinical, so it was really influential in that way. This one was read probably every summer from 1998-2002, and along with The Hot Zone, put USAMRIID squarely atop both my lists of "Places I'd Love To Work" and "Places I Never Want To Be Within 200 Miles Of Jesus God".

Politically Correct Bedtime Stories (and the others in the series) by James Finn Garner is basically what it says on the tin: a satirization of classic stories where the humor is two-pronged -- the narrator is overwhelmingly garrulous in his inoffensiveness while the stories themselves have been updated for a ~modern world and are often changed entirely to be radically feminist or socialist (but I don't recall being angry or feeling poked fun at, because they were so ridiculous?). The Christmas one was once an annual favorite. We spent a week or so reading these aloud in the back of English class sophomore year of high school; they're really funny.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams is the funniest shit, eminently quotable, and easily the best six-book trilogy ever published. I haven't read the posthumous one yet, and I hear it's not as good (Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl books were great at the beginning and suffered from series fatigue too, so I wonder if you can have the same problem picking up someone else's work), but they're all available on audio, many narrated by Stephen Fry or Martin Freeman, if you're into audiobooks like I am.

An analysis of selected lines of Arthur Conan Doyle's "A Scandal in Bohemia".
(Does anybody else start singing "La Vie Boheme" every time they see the title of this one?)

( The story wherein Irene will fuck you up. )

A fellow GQMF (props to

flawed_karma) beat me to uploading these to

ontd_startrek, but since this is actually a more complete listing of the ebooks, I figured though it didn't deserve its own post on the comm, it needed one somewhere.

This appears to be the most recently updated collection of Star Trek novels out there at the moment--it's got the Destiny books (which I managed to stop in the middle of *again* thanks to that stupid thing called school), but they're in LRF format which you'll have to google around for a reader/converter for because I added them in from an individual post. The rest of them are TXT files. You know, Notepad/Wordpad type basic stuff. Your best bet is to open them in Word or whatever your chosen software is, as that will put in the linebreaks for you--when you open them in Notepad, you'd have to scroll to the right to finish every line, which is mondo annoying. I dumped my LIT files for these both because, as was mentioned, this is a more complete archive, and because my Sony E-Reader takes RTF and these to RTF is a simple Word "save-as" rather than having to download converters and such. Hell, my MP3 player that I spent high school reading fics on on the school bus takes TXT, so it's a pretty universal format just because of its ancientness.

( The list of books it contains. )

I highly recommend the entire "Other Collections" section. The Dark Passions books I think I've raved about before--it's the DS9 Mirror Universe, L-Word style. It doesn't shy away from all the canon girlysex shown to be going on over there, which is refreshing, as most of the other MU books tend to do so. Section 31 books are also awesome. Anything with high quantities of Seven I'm good for, but the TNG one is about Sean Hawk, a bit character in ST: First Contact whose partner goes on to be one of the main characters in the Titan: Taking Wing series with Deanna and Riker on the Titan post-Nemesis. And of course, DS9's A Stitch in Time by Andy Robinson (the actor who played Garak) is entirely Garak's letters to Bashir and canonically reveals Garak's omnisexuality for anyone who managed to close their eyes so incredibly tightly to miss his wonderfully . . . odd acting. I mainlined DS9 last night (12 hours straight, no lie), and I have to tell you, that man is awesome. [/watch Alexandria pick out the gay]

Edit: Sendspace (the 2nd) link reupped, so both MU and SS should be working as of 4 July 2010.
These are
not links.
GQMF is not an adequate substitute for hypertext transfer protocol, unfortunately. Right click + copy URL so you can fix it yourselves.

Gertrude Stein = Doctor Seuss. Proof:

from "Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Faded"

I love my love with a v
Because it is like that
I love my love with a b
Because I am beside that
A king.
I love my love with an a
Because she is a queen
I love my love and a a is the best of them
Think well and be a king,
Think more and think again
I love my love with a dress and a hat
I love my love and not with this or with that
I love my love with a y because she is my bride
I love her with a d because she is my love beside
(And I would eat her in a boat
And I would eat her with a goat
And I will eat her in the rain
And in the dark. And on a train
And in a car. And in a tree
She is so good, so good, you see!)
I love my love
Thank you for being there
Nobody has to care
Thank you for being here
Because you are not there.

And with and without me which is and without she she can be late and then and how and all around we think and found that it is time to cry she and I.

INNIT?! This is what I mean by how everybody has a different definition of good poetry. I mean, this lady's famous for crying out loud. My dad's poem of epic schmoop that he wrote to my mom (touching in thought, though technique's lacking; mostly it's just so loveydovey that it's overwhelming) is better than this because at least it isn't Green Eggs and Ham.

Requisite daylight savings time fail story: I forgot that I'd already set my clocks the night before, so I was adjusting unnecessarily all morning and ended up going to breakfast an hour later than I'd planned.

I'm still counting down until Tuesday's SVU with large quantities of excitement. But added in a mini!countdown of excited until Castle on Monday because it sucks that Nathan Fillion keeps getting his shows prematurely canceled.

Also marathoning Conviction episodes in preparation for the SVU. Watching, erm, the 7th episode and I've rewound it twice to the part where Caruso's bitching at the basketball game on TV at the bar, and they definitely dubbed in "fuck" over the original "shit". It caught my ear the first time because that's not something you hear on primetime TV, you know. Why on earth? It's not even like you can't see his lips, he's facing the camera and it's obviously not what he said. It's noticeable because it never would have been let on network TV and if you're looking when you hear it, it's obviously dubbed over, so it's just stupid.

And working on my CV/resume. It's hard because all of my good activities and leadership stuff is in high school, which I don't think I'm really allowed to talk about much anymore. I'm still sneaking in as much of it as possible. Anything from spring on, at least.

Oh, did I mention I bowled a 148 on Friday? Win.

^^ As usual, this was ages ago. The laptop cord is completely broken now (the head bit that goes into the computer comes fully out from the cord), so I'm using it as little as possible because I don't know when it'll be when it finally decides not to charge at all.

Got an email to do a survey about some Harlequin ad, and out of curiosity, googled around to see if there were any gay Harlequin novels.

I was drawn in by one hit's tagline "Like a gay harlequin novel for political geeks", which sounds perfect for me, right? The page was a preview of NJ Governor McGreevey's memoirs, and began with a quote:

"We undressed and he kissed me. It was the first time in my life that a kiss meant what it was supposed to mean — it sent me through the roof," he wrote. "I was like a man emerging from 44 years in a cave to taste pure air for the first time, feel direct sunlight on pallid skin, warmth where there had only ever been a bone-chilling numbness."

"I pulled him to the bed and we made love like I'd always dreamed: a boastful, passionate, whispering, masculine kind of love"

And then continued with:

For those yearning for more McGreevey revelations, you'll have to wait until The Confession is released on September 19. When you arrive at your local retailer, McGreevey's book will be that one political memoir that starts out as a softcover, but becomes fully hard around chapter 4.

Best book preview last sentence ever.

"If the taxpayers are helping you, then you've got certain responsibilities to not be living high on the hog,"

Obama to detail further compensation limits

Damn straight. But then again, how many of the bailed-out CEOs really need a salary anyway? They'll cash in their stock options, maybe sell off one of their 4 Lamborghinis (which I'm surprised as hell I spelled right on the first try), and just keep on trekking. Still. Step in the right direction, considering what the Forbes list comes out with as salaries for the top CEOs every year. (Shift it to the teachers. The teachers!)

Microbiology test this morning? Quick. Should have been easy, had I been studying the easy stuff and not the hard shit that I didn't understand because he didn't really teach it. Lots of memorization of the history, which I've learned to expect to be the barely-skimmed-over part of these classes where it's not really relevant and have been unpleasantly surprised when this is not the case in two science classes here now.

And one question that just killed me--they wanted the name of the apparatus that lets you grow a continuous culture by feeding in and draining out a limiting nutrient that you then use to determine growth rate of a species. I looked at that last night and went "Oh, that's easy; I'll recognize it." Sure, I would have recognized it were it multiple choice. I remembered that it started with "chemo-". I could have danced around the word, bloody diagrammed it were it a short answer question. Nope. Fill in the blank, the stupidest test question type in existence. Seriously. Multiple choice gives you some context and lets you rely on recognition memory. Something with more room to answer lets you show that you know what you're talking about even if you forget the word. Can't come up with the exact term on fill in the blank and you're screwed. That's the one that I absolutely know I got wrong (I made up some "chemotron" thing that sounds more like a big technical piece of equipment than the "chemostat" it actually was).

And then a bunch more where I had spent too long working on trying to figure out what a south seeking magnetotactic bacterium in Flathead Lake would tend to do (questions from the book's online tests, which I mistakenly both prioritized higher since I don't have the actual book and spent much more time on since we covered the topics but not much of the actually questioned-on content, which should have been a clue in retrospect). So it was more "yeah, it's one of these. And this one sounds right. But not quite sure." The history stuff, mainly; the names I'd never heard before lecture and then didn't spend time reviewing because who really gives a damn about who did this first and when, so long as they did it?

*sigh.* Psychology next, which I'm hoping should be as easy as I'm expecting it to be, but as usual, I'm vaguely fearful that I'm entirely wrong. The bio test was all of 10 minutes max; I was out of the building by 8:20 when you add in my taking it and then going through it 2x more because I didn't want to turn it in first (the kid next to me looked like he finished it--turns out he just paused for a really long time whilst thinking--and just sat there, so I wondered if maybe we'd be grading it in class or something), so I got to my spot in the psych building (actually a different spot, because I brought my laptop cord today just in case and the spot with the tables that I usually use has no outlet) and had enough time to do this before I go through my notes again, as the class isn't until 10.

I started the third journal for my Hero and Quest class last night before realizing that she said "before Thursday" we must turn it in, which means that I can probably slide it under her door before my 9am on Thursday (hopefully she's not in before that), so I switched to the biology. That test is tomorrow as well, so maybe I can work the answers I'm going to write out for the study guide--this class appears to be very free response rather than the multiple choice/matching/"describe what myth's happening in this picture" of her class last semester, so I figured actually composing answers to all of the prompts is a good idea as she's mentioned pulling test stuff from there (though you never know to what extent teachers mean when they say that; could be anything from pulling questions word for word to their being related in topic and style)--into the reflective part of the journal. It's only got to be 2/3 as long as the others as there's no "talk about what happened in class" bit, as we had no class last week. The summary of the reading is going to require that I actually do some of the reading, though. The translation on the Internet Classics Archive of the Iliad isn't as good as the one I've been using by this Canadian professor that's also available online (he's translated a whole bunch of stuff and put it all out there for free, which is really awesome. I think I might email the guy and thank him at some point); I realized that I should have pointed it out to Dr. Johnson and asked what she thought of it in terms of, idk, accuracy and such, but it's a bit late now.

Should probably psych now. This is another one where I'm afraid there's going to be a whole load of names and dates I didn't memorize. There is a lot more history (more detailed, I guess) in the book than in the notes that I didn't really look at, which I'm hoping will be okay. I'm not planning on getting the book for this one at all, since I can pretty much get anything I need from his notes and the DSM (and, you know, AP Psych) and if really necessary, Chelsea (the cohab) is taking it as well and has the text sitting out on her desk that I can nab and quickly look things up in.

From Michael de Mare's Confessions of a Recovering Preppie

"Hi Shawna! How are you doing?"
"My circumstances are not good."
"Your circumstances?"
"Yes. They are not good."
Now I was concerned about Shawna's circumstances. They were, as Shawna had pointed out, not good. I didn't know which circumstances she was referring to, but I was sure that they were circumstances that she considered important. For this reason I hoped Shawna's circumstances would improve."

Nice.

Seriously. Seriously?

BookSwim is the first online book rental library club lending you paperbacks and hardcovers netflix-style directly to your house without the need to purchase!

I know my library does this already for the elderly and disabled. For, you know, free. I can see how it'd maybe be handy for the new Harry Potter book or whatever, but I bet these guys'd have the same kind of wait as at the library or only slightly shorter--you'd end up waiting for months for the one book and spending way more in membership fees than it would have cost you to buy the thing. And how often do people have books like that where they want to get it read right away when it comes out? It doesn't seem like high-profile releases like that happen very often.

Conclusion? If you sign up for this without good reason (i.e., you live 90 miles from the nearest library), you are officially a sucker.

Snagged from

babydykecate
According to The Big Read, the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books on their list.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

( 26. Not too bad, especially considering I've read bits of/started to read some on there that I didn't mark.. )

Got the big bits of my AII project done, finally. LOL, naturally, the morning they're due. There are some questions on the personality survey bits that I left blank, because I was a bit uncomfortable answering them, so I'll have to ask the teacher if I've got to have them all answered or not. I think I've got until the end of the hour to finish it, so if she says yes, I can bs something for that. I would have done it already but I was trying to keep this thing honest, since it's actually supposed to be all introspective and helping me, and the selective honesty I applied to most questions ("What are some reasons that you may not have performed as well as you could have in school" being one of those) wouldn't really cut it. Things like the worst times of my life, etc. And ones that I just couldn't come up with an answer for, like the best times of my life one.

LOL, just looked through the binder and I've actually got a whole bunch of questions on this article (that I thought I finished back in. . . September or so) left to go. Those'll get thrown out sometime quickly tomorrow.

At least the papers are done. I'm a little worried that because I didn't exactly fulfill all the prescribed curricula -- the job shadowing, to be specific, as the contacts there never panned out (though I've found a new lead that I may be able to hook up for next semester; too late for the project, but fine for my personal enrichment/enjoyment), as that's one of the five major parts of the second (the portfolio) half of the project. I've done a lot of medical exploring in hospital settings (the lab with my intellectual!girlcrush Lara last year, the NICU this year) that I could write up as semi-job shadowing, but the documentation form requires the supervisor to sign and describe activities and such, which I obviously never got done.

I'm at that stage where I know I should be tired and I know I need to go to bed (the undoubtedly numerous instances of odd phrasing and--hopefully fixed--typos in aforementioned writings should attest to that), but I'm some two Ritalin (because they weren't the extended release kind, thus one covered this morning and one this evening) and one giant Diet Dr. Pepper (from around 6pm, when I finally got out of the endodontist's) past sleepy. I would be all of that plus one gym trip, but I couldn't find the goshdarned keys with the passes again. IH how they always manage to get lost (though I think this time it was actually my fault, as I had them last when I went on Wednesday). I didn't really have the time to go anyway, as seen by the fact that I'm still technically not done with my AII project, plus there was nothing good on TV, but the fact that I'm lol!stress gaining weight (only a tidge--less than a pound, but it's more the fact that I stopped losing it even though I should be, my suckarse metabolism and all) as we approach the holidays and finals (both major stressors, but the former probably more than the latter, actually) and the restarting of the birth control kicking in does not happy make me.

Even though it's not really possible to do it healthily, I really want to drop 5 pounds or so before Christmas. That playing the viola for mass thing's got me up in front of the entire congregation (plus all the fakey Catholics who need to give my family their seats, LOL), and I've got this sparkly red dress (two of them that are almost exactly the same, though one's long sleeved and one short, actually) that I've worn maybe twice that I'm thinking about wearing because it's an excuse to look pretty, you know? And I want to actually look good in it. Idk if it's anywhere close to fitting, but it's pretty and sparkly and I can wear my holiday fishnets with it and I'm damn sure going to try to fit into it.

Though if it were green, it'd win. Green works so much better with my hair. I really want a nice, dark green sweater, as I have none. The one I've been wearing lately (because it fits really well and was part of that bunch of free clothes I got from the rummage sale they were cleaning out from my volleyball court) is red, and though it looks nice, my hair sort of blends in. Not blends in, but doesn't stand out and look all pretty like it does with a good forest green.

LOL, digression. If my paper on how to become an emergency department physician reads anything like this, I'm in trouble. Back to the paper/portfolio-y thing. I want to take it back this weekend and pretty it up some more, which idk if I can do, as it's technically due today. The teacher said that we could keep it over the weekend in order to prepare our presentations take two (this time to the class--meaning my friend Alyssa, plus probably the kids in there for study hall, meaning a bunch of freshmen and Katie--during the final), but I don't know if prettification is allowed. Prettification, probably, I guess, but fixification, no? I'm going to do it anyway. I had to return some of my book sources (and some I just cited from memory of pertinent memoirs and such I've read over the years, shh), so I've got literally no page numbers in my citations. Normally I'd just make them up, which I might still do, as a lot of it was general information either mentioned a few times or carried in attitude, but I'd like to at least get the chance to try and flip through and find where they referred to what I need.

I can even realize that I'm making no sense.

AHH! Spanish quiz to make up (from Monday, when I did/didn't have the medical terminology final in the morning and missed class) sometime today. Meaning the tail end of my first open hour, as I don't want to stay after and that's the only time I can catch him during the day when neither of us have class. (In fact, I was thinking about driving today so I could leave when I was done with economics and most definitely not stay after, but my temporary parking pass that I got for Monday's field trip to present my then-non-existent AII project to 5th graders ran out, meaning I'd have to park the mile or so down the road and hike in the near-freezing weather. Plus I'm getting towards being out of gasoline and have no cashy money for more. And it's prolly not a good idea to be driving too much in the slippreryish dark in less than 3.5 hours.) Meaning I've got to learn those words between now and said tail end of my open hour before Spanish. Thus cutting down on the time I've got to write answers to questions about the article I thought I finished. *headdesk* The bed is thus not happening ATM.

Because I am a failure, a good half or so of the paragraph that I'm on for this paper that was due yesterday has been left on my computer at school. So rather than write it again, I think I'm going to bed now to hopefully be able to pull together that plus a conclusion into a page or so during the 70ish minutes I'll have free before economics. Shouldn't be too hard, but then again, until my dog shut up (he thought he didn't get enough to eat tonight before we ran out of dog food, the baby, and so cried for hours until I finally tossed him a couple of pieces of bread just to shut him up before I was forced to open the front door and let him out into the neighborhood so he'd bother somebody else) I only managed to scrape together about half a page in some two hours.

Ehh. This is life. I do not want to get bitched at for not taking the trash out (in 4 hours or so). Like always.

Reminds self. You made up a couple of page numbers for the second book citation. If you ever want to do anything with this paper beyond turn it in to econ, fix that.

Edit: Oh, and I found that Star Trek book, Before Dishonor, that everybody's been talking about. It was Peter David, what can I say? Perhaps talk to come on that. It confused me, because I'm pretty sure there was supposed to be a book before that, but nothing in this book said so, so idk.

Have any of you read Midnight's Children? I rather like it, and as anybody who's read some of my fic/writing/whatever knows, I'm prone to using his same stream-of-consciousness writing from time to time, but never more so than right after (meaning within half an hour or so) of trying to finish up the book. It's hilarious, simply because though I'd use that kind of writing in a fic, and probably even more often when I'm just writing notes for myself, but writing it for something I have to translate into a coherent oral presentation is just dumb, but I didn't even really realize that I was doing it.

Seriously:

He is the one more than three, in the crumbling tower where time seems to stop and speed up simultaneously and he is immune from the war, he’s the bomb in Bombay, separate immune above the natural rules of English of time he is one more than three, not the past present or future, but commenting detailing recording them all from his perch in this time-ignoring bubble imposed upon him by the weight of history he feels has been thrust upon him by his status as a surviving midnight’s child

I can't say that. Well, I could, and I probably would if I weren't being graded on aforementioned coherence. Ahh. To translate, go I.

Quote of the Day:

"Don't let faux Klingons send real Americans to war."
David Wu (D-Oregon), 10 January 2007 address to US House of Representatives.

Yeah. Made me laugh. Found the bit of his speech on youtube; he starts off referencing those books that call Bush's support the Vulcans, and ends up saying that they're Klingons, not Vulcans, and fake Klingons at that.

Had a nightmareish thing Friday night. There was a bunch of stuff in it and for some reason a lot of it was set in my old elementary school, but the basic deal was that I didn't have my 20 minute speech prepared for theatre on Monday. Well, it's not looking good in real life.

I had planned to work on it on Saturday, but I've been sick all of a sudden and so I didn't feel well and then we went TV shopping and when I got home on Saturday I was too tired to do much. Friday was spent finishing reading the damn play, finishing watching the movie of said damn play (because we've been taught so little that I've got no idea how to express what I want on stage and I hoped that the movie would help me out in that area a bit), moping around feeling sick and watching DS9 episodes while sprawled out in bed, and then working. Now I'm back, just finished finishing watching the play, but am really too tired to do anything. Problem is that even though I'm legitimately sick enough to not show up tomorrow, this is a one day, no extensions, no nothing type of deal that gets recorded and sent off to wherever to be graded as part of the eighty-someodd dollars I spent as registration (the money being for said grading, truly). Man, this is definitely the most expensive class I'm taking this year. No kidding. I've spent (or should have spent, a couple of times I managed to get in free somehow), not counting the registration money, more than $30 going to see plays and such.

Back to the TV shopping. My mum bought some entertainment center thing (which I always used to think meant TV and stereo and DVD player and such, but really is just the cabinet for some dumb reason) and mixed up our entire front room, and me being so vehemently anti-change freaked out and told her that it looked horrid (it makes the whole room off center as the TV's now way off to the left and the new focal point of the room is this patch of bare wall in the middle where the molding at the bottom was ripped off right after everything got moved in order to replace it for some reason) and she yelled at me for being so negative (true, but it really did look bad) and completely irrationally and mostly because I was pissed at my mum, I then refused to go into the front room for a day and a half (or really just 20 hours or so, excepting the couple of times I averted my eyes as I had to go through to get a drink or something). We get to Saturday and my brother brings home two disks of the Deep Space Nine season two DVDs, and I'm trying to get them to play, but the TV just has fuzz on the input channel when it should be playing them. I fiddle with the cords, trying every combination, but neither DVD nor VHS input is working. My brother phrases something poorly and mum jumps on me for blaming her (when I hadn't even said a bloody thing, where's the fair in that), and I go back into my room to start reading some of the Beckett crap I got from the library. Later, I hear that shortly after that the whole TV display went out; it quit working for regular TV too, not just input things. So my dad and I then spend nearly two hours between CompUSA (as they're moving all the stores out of our city and as such we figured they might have cheapy TVs, and they were all 15% off, but they only had big flat screen things that were hugely expensive to begin with, so we moved on) and Best Buy, end up getting one from the latter. Which was no easy task, as we finally find a good and semi-reasonably priced one, but then they can't find the one that they've supposedly got in stock. Turns out that they don't have one, but then I ask if we could get the display one, because I really liked that one and it was the only one that had decent picture and would fit in said new ~~entertainment center~~ cabinet and wasn't a bazillion dollars. They say yes, but then they can't find a remote and don't have a box, so we're fiddling around with that, finding out if universal remotes will work (they said only one brand would, but luckily we brought it home and found out they were wrong and the cheapy kind we have does) and such. Da talks them down like $50, which was impressive (though half of it was in gift card form, annoyingly). He's really good at that, because he worked in retail for a while and just always asks. Most people have no idea that you can do that, or at least I figure my entire generation doesn't, but he says that there's always a lot of wiggle room with price and most of the time if you're looking at the right stuff you can get them to knock it down a little, especially if it's the last one in stock and there's no remote/box/documentation like with the TV. Anyway. Oh, and the guy selling it to us was rather nice looking and called my dad Sir. I love that.

We bring this TV home and plug it in and it's nearly 10:30, but I start watching the "Endgame" movie before going to bed. Wake up this morning and mum's bitching about how it takes like 5 seconds to change channels. Which it does, which is annoying as hell. She wants it taken back now, though, as supposedly TVs are like 2/3 or half that price around Christmas. I'm all "So, we're supposed to not have a TV until Christmas?" *shakes head* I dunno. Odd stuff, my mum lately. I decided this time that it's some odd Freudian shit. She's subconsciously afraid that I'm going to challenge her for her position as alpha-female, and as such is pre-emptively striking at me out the wazoo. That or she's just PMSing. I'm wagering it's a combo of the two. But my da says that his mum and sisters did the same thing, which is what makes me go towards the former. Even though I think Freud is a chauvinist pig, I do see where he gets his ideas.

Anyway. A good 30 minutes or so wasted typing this that I could have spent figuring out what the hell I'm going to talk about for 20 minutes tomorrow. I'm prolly going to make most of it up on the spot. Whatever. I was all uber, uber depressed Friday and to a slightly lesser extent (meaning that I wasn't actively thinking about how I wanted to kill myself, but still just as bad all the same) on Saturday, and right now I've now got the 'still really depressed in general but at this present moment in time closer to apathy than wrist-slitting' thing going on. Which suggests to me that dumb medicine isn't working, but on the off chance it is, I started the new pack today instead of waiting until Wednesday because I didn't feel like being miserable if it could be helped.

I'm probably going to go to sleep now if I can (I had a horrid time going back to sleep after I woke up after aforementioned nightmare on Friday just because I was thinking about how I might not get it prepared well; without having it prepared really at all at this point I dunno if I'll be able to sleep, but we can hope). I'm gonna set my alarm for a few hours from now, wake up and try to work on it then when I'm not just thinking about how tired I am. Hopefully my stupid stomach won't be bugging me as much then.

Oh, and if any of you haven't read yet and get the chance to read "Chronicle of a Death Foretold" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, you totally should. I love the writing style of it, all circular and reporter-like and fun. Plus, the story is really good--you've got honor and murder and religion and apathy and all those fun things (I'd explain more, but I don't know how to talk about the interesting bit of the story without giving stuff away). I really want to at some point try to write something styled like that (shorter, though, as it's basically a sorta small novel) because it's such an interesting form. This is probably the thing that I've had to read for school that I've enjoyed the most all year. Even though I've still got like 30 pages to go in it, actually, now that I think about it. I should finish that. Ha, but I won't be in english class tomorrow because I've got to do the theatre thing, so I don't have to try to get through it tonight. Like I'd do it tonight anyway.

Current Mood: morose

So. I'm really stressing about this mock trial thing ~~tomorrow~~ today. Because I don't have my stuff memorized. And I really need to, because evidently I got docked big time for using notes first round. Umm, it's specifically in the rules that you can't dock for using notes, but they do it anyway, which pisses me off.

School is probably more stressing right now. I'm behind in everything, but the quarter ends Friday, so all the time that I thought I had to gather courage and ask teachers to be able to make up work is gone. And even if they agreed to let me, between mock trial Tuesday and Thursday, preparing for it tonight and Wednesday, I have no evenings to do this work. My report card's going to suck, I'm not going to be able to bring my grades up for semester at all, and I'm going to be right back where I used to be, with straight Bs and prolly a couple of Cs at the rate I'm going. It's totally different from previous years, though, because back then it was more "Oh, I do just what I need to to get by", but now I can't force myself to work. At all. I stress and get sick whenever I think about it, so I don't work, trying to avoid said stress, but really just cause more by not doing the work. I've said this all a thousand times, but it's never helped me.

Mock trial coach lady yelled at us on Sunday for bitching about the team combination thing. I was going to defend myself (because she made it seem like we were defaming the personal qualities of the people on the team while that was not the case; we simply discussed how their skill wasn't up to par and mainly how we disagreed with the policy. With the skill bit, it's the same way that you would say "Yeah, so and so's not good at math, really.") and explain that we're simply in disagreement with her decision to select the team in that manner, but the group she was bitching at was comprised halfly of people who weren't involved at all, so were I to start talking back, it would drag them into it and I didn't want to do that. She wants me to wear this suit jacket thing of hers, though, which is pretty much too small. I'm like "Okay, but I can't so much button it as not." She's like "Yeah, that's fine". I'm not crazy about it, honestly, I'm a fan of my mostly unbuttoned red long sleeved dress shirt and low cut black tanktop underneath when we're going against co-ed and guys' schools. Kidding, but it's more comfortable than trying to smush a tight jacket on top of that.
Speaking of, I've got to go find my pants. They were in the bathroom for a while, but I finally threw them down the laundry chute a few days ago. So they're in the laundry room in the basement somewhere. Which means that they're undoubtedly wrinkly (even though these pants are really good at staying unwrinkled, there's only so much they can take) so I'll have to get up early and iron them. Grr. Though not, I guess, because I'm pretty sure I'm going home before trial like I usually do (for just an hour or so, but I can't stand being away from home for 16 hours like that without time to sit down and relax).

English journal conferences this week. Realized I haven't been doing my journal at all this quarter. I have maybe four pages of it. Shit. And my grade is hugely riding on this thing. I heard one girl had one zero and it brought her down to a 79%. My one zero in that class is for a huge thing. I've got to be practically failing.

Spanish test tomorrow also. Same with bio. Both grades also riding on these tests. Got a 73% on the last Spanish test (I, along with more than half the class, got one entire conjugation section wrong for some reason) and I never do well on the vocab quizzes, so I doubt I've got higher than a B- in there at the moment. Bio is easy, but I don't know this stuff that well (as he really didn't teach it, grr) and it's all diagrams and such to draw and essays. Multiple choice I can get, because those tend to be easy, but I have to diagram from scratch a bunch of stuff. Grr.

Started a book Sunday evening, finished it this afternoon: Trial by Journal by Kate Klise. It's a kids' book, really, but I thought it was entertaining. It's a quick read, something to do while you're lounging around and want to do something easy but fun for two hours. Twas cute. I had started going back through and rereading the Everworld books, but I can't find my copy of book 3, so I stopped until I can locate it (I'm not one for reading out of order when I've not read the books for several years) and my sister really loves the Klises' books, and this was lying around, so I picked it up.

So. I'm going to finish this fic I'm reading and then go to bed. Because yay, sleep. I've been doing that a lot lately. Ish. I'm waking up every 2 hours or so, more and more frequently as it gets closer to morning. I'm falling asleep for 15 minutes and then waking up as it nears 6:30. So I'm having to sleep for longer periods to counter the fact that I'm not getting good sleep. I've given up on the whole stay up to do work thing. I don't do the work anyway, so why the hell am I staying up? It's odd, though, if I go to bed at 10ish and get up at 6ish (like I did Sunday night), you'd think I wouldn't always be as tired as I am. My mum makes these comments about how I spend all my time sleeping, and I'm like "But I don't--I can't sleep most of the time!" I get really defensive about it, for some reason. An odd one, I am.

Current Mood: stressed
Current Music: Battlestar Galactica Miniseries soundtrack

I was reading Endgame, by Samuel Beckett, today in theatre, and I kinda really wanted to write apocalypse fic. Of the SG-1 persuasion, actually. Just because that's what popped into my head after the House idea that made no sense and had a plausibility level of zero. And the SG-1 idea wasn't horrid, actually, though I'd never be able to pull it off as I still don't know the fandom that well (I haven't had time to go back to trying to watch the DVDs of late, I'm still in the middle of season 4) and can't really write things of that sort that would get across the deepness that I'd like.

So. Evidently Teryl Rothery is credited as being the ISN reporter in the newest, yet to be released item in the Babylon 5 saga. And she's credited pretty high up on the IMDB list, she's third after only Sheridan and Lochley. Cool. That's another show I'm behind in. I'm all crazy about the beginning, but once it gets into the war, it doesn't interest me as much. I'm still right where I was at the end of the summer, the first disk of season four.

Must bed. I couldn't fall asleep last night for the life of me even though I didn't take a nap or anything (and usually even if I do nap, it's not ever a problem) due to coughing specifically and I don't know why but I'm assuming stress generally, so hopefully tonight will be better.

Umm, evidently there's some fine on my public library record for something called "Kingdom Keepers" because it's missing disk number 4. And it's $15. I've never heard of that. Pretty sure I've never checked it out. The library people have been fucking up my account lately. For example. I returned a bunch of stuff. A while ago. A few days ago, it was still on my record as checked out and accumulating fines. WTF? I go back today, and some of it's gone from the record, but the fines that accumulated after I gave it back but before they checked it in are still there. So, um, thanks guys. Because of this crap, my account's past the fine limit and I can't renew these books that I've got out, which are now, as a result, accumulating more fines.

Thanks, guys. Not even cool. What happened to the old public library? The one I walked down to each day and started helping them shelve books in preschool? The one where bureaucratic crap was trumped by reading every time? It's gone. I don't like it.

Current Mood: irate

Random excitement. New printing of Blayne Cooper and TNovan's Madam President and First Lady novels is happening sometime this month. Yay for that. If the books weren't so darn expensive, I would have bought them already. Because I tend not to spend money on books unless I've already read them or others by that author and liked it, it's pretty much high praise that I want to buy them. Though, not if they cost a lot. I refuse to pay more than like $5 for a paperback book, because anything more seems kinda outrageous to me, being all with the thrifty and such. But Madam President was everywhere listed online for like $50 because it went out of print and I guess there weren't many copies, and I was like "yeah, like that's gonna happen." The reprint is listed to be $20, which is still more than I'll pay, but I'm hoping that this will maybe stick a whole bunch more used copies into the used copy market, and as such I'll be able to find a cheap copy somewhere.

Really tired. Got home and took like a 4 hour nap because I didn't sleep last night. 4 hours doesn't really cut it, however. Got so much work to do for this science project, I'm really nutting out over it (and yet still not actually working). *tries to drag self back to work*

Current Mood: rushed

So. Local weather people have been talking this supposedly huge winter storm up for several days now. We've got teachers counting on days off and canceling speakers that were supposed to come in to talk, the library (where I just was for a talk on Civil War medicine that was interesting, but the guy had some of his medical terminology wrong, which bugged me) telling people to call in the afternoon before the second Civil War lecture thing tomorrow evening to see if they've canceled it, etc. I totally doubt that we're going to get anything.

The pressure did drop like nobody's business; you can tell that by the fact that I'm literally limping worse than 3rd season House. When the weather gets bad, my legs decide that walking is for losers.
Temperature tomorrow morning is supposed to be 20F below what it was this morning at the same time. High was 69F today, it's going to be 40F tomorrow. That's like a 30 point drop. Whoa.

Forecasty type thing:
Tomorrow: Cloudy with rain and freezing rain expected. Thunder possible. Morning high of 40F with temps falling to near 30F.
Tomorrow night: Periods of snow, sleet or freezing rain in the evening, becoming all snow late. Windy. Low 23F. Snow accumulating 5 to 8 inches.
Friday: Winds with snow showers early. Bright sunshine later. Cold. High near 30F.

I'm a fan of this cold stuff, so that's nice. It's been unseasonably warm of late, so much so that you're uncomfortable if you're outside long or go outside after excercising or something because you've gotten used to the cold so far this half-assed winter (half-assed because it's been unseasonably warm a lot).

And I've heard something about this weather system going the wrong way or something that makes it really weird and more dangerous.

But the national weather service isn't saying it's going to be nearly as bad as the local weather people and random people around town are. And I'm more likely to side with them because they're all governmenty and have good satellites. And because of the fact that I've got 3 tests on Friday, so of course there's no chance that it's going to be bad enough to have a snow day. And because the cool weather systems alway skip over us.

Mock trial meeting. Got the case. It sucks. It's written so badly. The dialoguey bits are very un-dialoguey and stilted. There are huge numbers of just dumb mistakes written in as being done by the investigator; mistakes that would get this case completely thrown out of court in a heartbeat if it were a real case. Some amount of flaw so there's something to hit him with on cross is fine, but they wrote him as a complete moron with no crime scene investigation skills at all. There are mistakes in the actual writing/formatting of the case: there's a note on the front page that says "incorporate somewhere:" and then some stuff that obviously was supposed to be worked in to the intro to the case but the note to self was just left on the front, there are two different notary signatures on the bottoms of two different witness statements that are obviously supposed to be the same person (same ID number and notary license expiration date) but have two different (though similar) names, one witness is called by two different names (though we're unsure as to whether that's a typo or just more proof that the aforementioned investigator is incompetent, as it was in his statement), etc. And whoever wrote this decided grammar is for losers.

So. The case was . . . 17 or so days late and they still couldn't get somebody to look it over before they posted it? And 17 days, come on. The trial dates don't get pushed back because they were two and a half weeks late coming out with the case.

Got the new Artemis Fowl book. Not looking anywhere near as good as the previous ones.
I'm on page 117 and they haven't explained how Artemis knows about the People again. It's only been one year and not the several that he told Mulch to wait before giving him back the disk, so he obviously rediscovered them some other way. I'm a little confuzzled. Artemis mentions being a different person now (and is acting like it again). Yeah, he was a different person before he got his mind wiped, but Colfer showed us specifically at the end of the last book that he was back to his old criminal self.
And Holly left the LEP. Erm, I can't exactly see her doing that. There was a dumb reason given about her and the new head of LEP not meshing, but she went into private detecting (with Mulch, something else that I wouldn't so much have seen her doing) and talks about how unsatisfying it is--Holly is definitely smart enough to have been able to anticipate the difficulties in doing undercover detecting work when she's famous and anticipate her not liking it. It seems to just have been a way to get her into the secret quasi-government group (led by Commander Vinyáyá, and due to her always having Holly's back and being all friendly like and being the somebody whom Holly actually complements on things like hair that Holly'd consider trivial, I've decided they are so doing each other) to further the plot.
If he explains everything well as we go along, maybe it'll get better, but more than 100 pages in with no explanation and random stuff going on isn't endearing me to this latest installment.
But yay for there being another thingie in Gnomish along the bottom of the pages. Way back when I was translating the first one I ended up memorizing it without really trying, and though I'd effectively forgotten most of it, just looking at the first couple pages it's coming back pretty quickly. *is a dork*

Haven't yet watched the last 20 minutes of the House episode, but from what Katie tells me, I got bloody Jossed again. Not in a huge way, but two non-implants and a miscarriage was exactly what I had in mind for Cuddy when she was at this point in one of my stories. That I don't have anymore due to bloody lack of bloody hard drive, anyway, so it doesn't matter so much. Oh! *remembers* I actually do have a handwritten copy of this one. Though it's only the very very very first draft and I was happy with the last one and made so many changes between the two. Still. Must find. Because now my little scene snippet thing isn't ~~just~~ as much supposition, it's actually got more canon basis than I intended.

Current Mood: geeky

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don't you know by now {you can't turn back}

because this road is all you'll ever have

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