Things are happening

First of all, I got a JET interview! In case you've forgotten, JET is the Japan Exchange and Teaching program, which I applied for back in November. Yesterday, I received email notification that I am one of the people who made the cut (a lot of people, including some people I know, didn't), so I have an interview at the consul in Seattle in about three weeks. I'll have to miss a couple of days of class for it, but I'm pretty sure that won't be a problem given that it's, you know, a massively important part of my attempt to have something to do after I graduate. JET is really competitive, so clearly I'm doing something right. Wish me luck with the interview - it's a panel thing and I've been told they can ask some pretty difficult questions. Fortunately, I actually own proper business attire now, so I'll be able to go in looking like a serious candidate.

Suddenly, I feel way closer to graduation. Since I'm not applying for grad school, I've been in a weird sort of liminal space for awhile. Most of the people around me are rushing around trying to get stuff done and turned in, and I've just been chilling because there's not a lot I can do yet. Securing my first interview for something post-graduation was like a reminder that, yeah, I really do graduate in May. And I am definitely ready, let me tell you.

But my classes this semester are pretty awesome. I've got my senior seminar on Milton's "Paradise Lost" (for which I'll be writing a thesis, just one related to the course rather than an independent body of research), Apocalyptic Lit (best class ever), and Baroque and Neoclassical Visual Culture (most entertaining professor I've ever had). Oddly, they all kind of interrelate, which was completely unintentional.

So I'm enjoying my last term, I really am. I love Apocalyptic Lit like you wouldn't believe - Strelow is a spectacular professor who is very tangential and incredibly quotable. Yesterday's soundbite, while talking about Puritans back in the seventeenth century: "We've got the instruction manual, the Bible, so we can just flip through it and find out what we're supposed to do. Neighbors drinking beer on Sundays? Let's go to church and pray for them, and then go beat 'em up. Which is exactly what they did."

Another good quote from that lecture was: "You'll find that Nietzsche is Emerson on steroids."

For that class, we first read the Book of Revelation and D.H. Lawrence's Apocalypse (a very short, scathing little book - I loved it), and now we're working with Eliot's "The Waste Land" and a couple of Blake poems. Then we're moving onto novels: Love in the Ruins (Percy), White Noise (DeLillo), Slaughterhouse Five (Vonnegut), The Handmaid's Tale (Atwood), The Crying of Lot 49 (Pynchon), and The Road (McCarthy). Isn't that a great reading list? I've read Slaughterhouse Five and White Noise before, but the rest of it's new. I'm psyched.

As for the rest, my seminar is pretty sweet. The professor is amazing and chill and there are only 10 of us (one girl dropped), so it's really informal and relaxed. We also only meet regularly through the first week of March - after that, it's individual meetings as needed until we have to start presenting portions of our theses to the collective. My plan right now is to go meet with the professor on Friday, actually, to start brainstorming. PL is a huge work and I feel like, if I don't pick an angle early on, I'm going to feel really overwhelmed later when I have to find a focus for a 25-30 page paper.

And, finally, the art history class is just fun to attend. It's taught by de Mambro Santos, who is Brazilian and has come to us by way of Rome (he used to teach at the University of Rome and has written some books about art in Italian and it's kind of crazy that he settled here). His accent is very odd and his lectures are manic in the best possible way. He's also pretty quotable, making comments about art like, "Look at this guy! He's not only old, he's disgustingly old! He's about to fall over and be corrupted by worms!" That was in reference to a detail in Rafael's Transfiguration of Christ.

And that's about it for me. I've had a lot of insomnia, but overall things are going well. I'm working three hours a week in Ye Olde Writing Center (one hour on Tuesdays and two on Thursdays), which means I'll make more money than I did last semester, and so far this is a good semester for me. As well it should be, considering how much I've put up with to get here.

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Books of 2010, as of 27 January
1. The Sign of Four - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
2. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
3. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
4. Apocalypse - D.H. Lawrence

My name is Alexis and I am a bibliophile

Today I was moderately productive! I went to the transit centre to acquire an Orca card (they're bus cards that you put money on, so you don't have to use cash, kind of like Japanese train cards), then I spent almost two hours in Barnes & Noble. I didn't buy anything because everything I wanted was outrageously expensive and I refuse to spend $15 on a paperback, but I spent part of that time in the cafe with coffee and my Moleskine, scribbling writing notes for when I conquer my listlessness enough to actually sit down and write something marginally coherent. And, anyway, time spent in a bookstore is never time wasted.

Then I came home, took a look at my books (which, for the record, are kept in... 7 different places because they don't fit properly), and decided to go through them and pull out ones I can do without. So now I have a bag full of books that I'm going to take to Half-Price books and attempt to sell. Someone else will have more use for Red Star Over China than I will at this point, I'm sure. The bag contains a mix of fantasy novels I'm not keen on anymore, books I inexplicably have two copies of, books I never really liked to begin with, and school-related books I didn't sell back for whatever reason.

I also discovered, in the process of going through my bookcase, shelves, and drawers full of books, that I have a lot of philosophy and poetry. And a good 15-20 books I've never read. I think I just compulsively buy them, then get an emotional attachment and agonize over whether I can bear to part with them, whether I've read them or not. It's like this voice in the back of my mind goes, "But you might want to read them later and then where will you be?" Absolutely ridiculous. Which is why I'm forcing myself to part with about two dozen.

Anyway, at the end of my book-sorting adventure, I discovered that I will be returning to Salem with more books than I brought with me. To begin with, I can't very well leave The Complete Sherlock Holmes because I'm only a third of the way through, but I also can't leave the two books I brought and haven't finished. Then there's Slaughterhouse-5, which I know I'll be reading for my Apocalyptic lit class and don't want to have to buy again, and Catch-22, which I've been half-way through for the last eternity. I also need to bring my literary theory book from sophomore year because I know I'll need it for my English classes. I did last semester, anyway, and didn't have it. I intend to avoid that issue this time around.

In conclusion? Maybe I should read the books I already have before buying more. It would save money and cut down on my owning books I don't even remember buying to begin with.

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Books of 2010, as of 6 January
1. The Sign of Four - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
2. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The start of a new year

I entered 2010 in a pretty quiet, low-key sort of way. I went into the International District during the day with my friend Ashalyn, to go to the Asian American History Museum and eat good food and generally just hang, then I spent the rest of the night at home. The weather is typical for Seattle in January - rain and fog and general ick - and I've been spending a lot of time wrapped up in a blanket reading Sherlock Holmes (Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell is on hold). After seeing the new film (which I enjoyed mostly for Robert Downey Jr, who should play scruffy, disheveled Victorians more often, the Holmes and Watson dynamic, and the music) I decided to revisit the canon. So my 2010 reading is off to a good start. I'm planning to keep a list again and, where 2009 capped with 28 books (I read A Study in Scarlet before the year ended), I think I can hit 30 at least in 2010. I also think I will count school books for one class this semester, since I'm taking Apocalyptic Literature and will be reading novels.

But, yes, Holmes. I'd forgotten how much I love these stories (and just how much I love the character Sherlock Holmes). At Half-Price Books today I found the complete canon (all four novels and 56 short stories in one hard-back book) for $8.00 and I'm making a decent dent in it. I also found two volumes of James Bond for $4.00 each, so now I have six of the original 14 Fleming novels (little known fact: I love James Bond - it's kind of a guilty pleasure, except I'll freely admit to it). It was just one of those days at the bookstore where what I wanted was actually there.

So, really, 2010 is off to a good start. I'm reading a lot, catching up on my sleep, getting together with old friends, and taking a well-deserved break before diving into my final semester as an undergraduate student. I've applied for JET and am waiting to find out if I got an interview, I have another possible Japan job that I want more than JET waiting to be applied for, and things are going pretty well. I don't do the resolutions thing, but I do intend to read more and try to actually update that media blog I started every once in awhile. And to enjoy my life, that's definitely key.

明けましておめでとうございます！

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Books of 2010, as of 1 January:
1. The Sign of Four - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Things to read

First off:

Books of 2009, as of 27 December
1. Autobiography of a Blue-Eyed Devil - Inga Muscio
2. Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
3. Anansi Boys - Neil Gaiman
4. The Zombie Survival Guide - Max Brooks
5. Neuromancer - William Gibson
6. The Opposite of Fate - Amy Tan
7. The Joy-Luck Club - Amy Tan
8. The Bonesetter's Daughter - Amy Tan
9. Takarazuka (Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan) - Jennifer Robertson
10. The Hundred Secret Senses - Amy Tan
11. The Kitchen God's Wife - Amy Tan
12. Cunt - Inga Muscio
13. Beyond Heaving Bosoms (The Smart Bitches Guide to Romance Novels) - Sarah Wendell, Candy Tan
14. Killing Rage - bell hooks
15. Fragile Things - Neil Gaiman
16. Polite Lies - Kyoko Mori
17. Looking for the Lost (Journeys Through a Vanishing Japan) - Alan Booth
18. Lost Japan - Alex Kerr
19. Geisha: A Life - Mineko Iwasaki
20. Women of the Pleasure Quarters - Lesley Downer
21. The Faded Sun Trilogy - C.J. Cherryh [it's an omnibus, so I'm counting it as one]
22. The Loved Dead - H.P. Lovecraft
23. Idoru - William Gibson
24. Looking for Jake - China Mieville [a volume of short fiction]
25. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
26. Dune - Frank Herbert
27. World War Z - Max Brooks

Now I'm on to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell by Susanna Clark. It's a long book, so I'll probably be at it for a week at least. It's sort of alternate history meets fantasy, which I love: 19th century England with magic, more or less. I've only just started, so I don't have an opinion yet, but I think it'll be a fun read. And, if you like zombies at all, read World War Z because it's awesome. It's written as an oral history of the zombie apocalypse - interviews with and first hand accounts from people who survived it (soldiers, politicians, normal people, etc.). Brilliant stuff.

Outside of the realm of books, but still related, I've fallen deeply, passionately in love with two web comics. I wasn't into web comics for a long time, to be perfectly honest, but recently I stumbled across a couple and started reading and am now completely engrossed and waiting for them to pick back up now that Christmas is past.

The first one is Trying Human. It's a sci-fi romance predominantly about a woman who gets abducted by aliens (who look sort of like stereotypical UFOs) and eventually falls in love with one of them. Then there are subplots, mostly about other attempts at inter-species romance. The title comes from this thing the second alien species in the comic (reptilian) have, the Trying Human circuit, which lets the alien wearing it take on the appearance of a human. So, if you like sci-fi, it updates every Monday and Thursday.

The second one is Beauty and the Beast. As I'm sure you've guessed by the title, it's a retelling of the fairy tale, with a somewhat unusual take on the story and great art (very distinctive and nothing like the Disney film). The Beauty character is a little too perfect, but considering the nature of the story, it's forgivable. This one updates 5 days a week.

Yes, it's Christmas break, which means it's time to catch up on my reading.

Almost Done

First of all: I will be back in Seattle December 20 (that's next Sunday, for the record). Actually, I might be back Saturday night, but I'm getting a ride from Alex like usual, so it depends on whether he wants to leave after his last final on Saturday, or wait till Sunday morning. I'll be around till mid-January (like, the 16th or 17th), so if you want to hang out (and why wouldn't you? I mean, seriously), we can definitely work that out.

I'm also getting my wisdom teeth extracted at some point, because one of them has been actually causing on and off pain since, oh, October, but awesomeness needs to go down around my first ever experience with dental surgery.

Actually, speaking of my wisdom teeth and pain, how lame is it that I don't have dental coverage outside of the state of Washington? I was so mad when I learned that a couple months ago. I am in pain (minor and not all the time, but still) and I can't deal with it until I leave Oregon for more than a couple of days.

Putting all that aside, it is cold in Salem. And I don't mean cold like 'maybe I should wear an extra sweater today,' I mean cold, like 'oh, wow, my arm just snapped off and shattered like an icicle on the floor.' We're reaching such blistering high temperatures as 28 degrees during the day and it's getting down to the low teens at night (it's 18 degrees right now). Salem is almost never this cold. The stream running through campus actually froze last night. To make matters worse, my apartment has 1920s windows with no insulation, so there is a constant draft. And, just to add insult to injury, it's really dry, so I'm getting little annoying nosebleeds about 5 times a day and there's not even any snow to make up for the suffering.

So:

Dear Oregon Weather Gods,

If you're going to subject me to painful cold, the least you could do is throw in some snow to make me feel better. This whole dry cold thing? Yeah, I don't approve.

No love,
Me

And, just to close up another of my habitual all-over-the-place blog entries, tomorrow and Friday are Christmas in Hudson Hall (the big Christmas program the choir department does every year - readings and carols and... stuff), classes end on Friday, my only finals are next Thursday and Friday, which means I have plenty of study time should I need it, Annie and I are hosting a Christmas party on Saturday, and I am all but counting the hours until this term ends. So burned out. So ready for Christmas and relaxing for a few weeks.

Actually, I'm ready for it to be May. Graduation is looking pretty good right now.

Sci-Fi Nerd Post Ahead

Okay, so it's no secret that I love science-fiction. The novel I'm still writing for NaNoWriMo¹ is sci-fi, my favourite TV show of all time is Babylon 5, my favourite novel is Dune, and I've watched at least some of every incarnation of Star Trek (my favourites are The Original Series and Deep Space Nine). It's probably safe to say, in fact, that sci-fi is my favourite genre. So, I want to take a moment to talk about Star Trek. Not the new movie, which I can enjoy as long as I pretend it has nothing to do with any other Star Trek and overlook the plot holes big enough to drive the Enterprise through, because I've already discussed my issues with it and more or less moved on. No, I want to talk about the fact that, in all these years, they still haven't had queer people and the few times they've come close, they've managed to cop-out at the last minute.

DS9 is an easy example of where they totally could have gone there... and didn't. You see, right at the very beginning of Season 1 the character Garak is introduced. He comes up to Doctor Bashir, introduces himself and proceeds to hit on him in a slightly sketchy way for the duration of their short conversation. It's totally there. In fact, it was supposed to be. Andrew Robinson, the actor who played Garak, has said so. However, the show's producers saw that first meeting and told him he was playing the character too gay and needed to knock it off. The hitting on Bashir thing doesn't totally go away, and Garak gets all the best lines, but it does lighten up and I'm pretty sure the fact that Garak and Bashir have fewer conversations as the show progresses is due largely to the fact that there was a lot of chemistry that could be easily interpreted as flirting. Then, because Andrew Robinson is awesome, he wrote a Garak novel (there are a lot of Star Trek novelisations, if you live under a rock without used bookstores and hadn't noticed) that says straight up that Garak is bisexual. Lovely man, Andrew Robinson.

They also almost went in the queer-friendly direction in Enterprise. Originally, one of the officers (I don't remember which one, I'm not a huge fan of this series) was supposed to be gay and there were going to be little nods to it like references to a past relationship and whatnot. It wasn't going to be a focus, or an issue within the show, just a positive inclusion of a queer character. Then they decided not to, gave him an ex-wife or something like that, and ditched the whole thing. And that annoys me so much. Just... fail. So much fail. Babylon 5 went there back in the mid-90s, with a lesbian sub-plot for part of the series, because JMS is bad ass and does things like that (the Pope is also a woman), but out of all the Star Trek series and films and novels (except Andrew Robinson's), no one will include a visible queer character anywhere.

I still love DS9 and TOS, and Voyager and TNG are also awesome (Enterprise is so-so), but it bothers me that they could pretty easily take that one step and just won't do it. I hold out hope, though, that one day they will.

Related, but on a different note, if I look half as fierce as Nichelle Nichols when I'm in my 70s, I'll be ecstatic. And, if you watch TOS, you'll notice that Uhura's legs are in the background of so many shots on the bridge. I'm pretty sure they framed shots specifically so her legs would be visible, even when she has nothing to do with the interaction in the foreground. I'm serious.

I'll just go back to rewatching B5 (albeit slightly out of order, because I wanted to watch The Corps is Mother, The Corps is Father and that's from season 5) and keep my fingers crossed that Star Trek will get with it.

But first, I need to go turn in my application to graduate. That'd be a smart thing to do.

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¹ National Novel Writing Month. I wrote 50,204 words between November 1 and 29, winning the challenge with one day to spare, but the novel is still only 2/3 of the way through. I'll get there eventually.