My Dreamwidth drafts page has become cluttered with the beginnings of entries, which seems to represent the last couple of weeks pretty well, tonally -- I've felt scattershot, some combination of tired, unproductive, and too busy. Changing season, an unexpected quantity of part-time work which pays well but does not pay soon, the usual toll of being a light sleeper sharing a room with someone I love very much and who snores...
But here, I've deceived myself into writing all these entries using a structure where I can stop at any time. Win.
Entries:
1. 'There's coffee in the cupboard again'. To be followed by something about how, after four years of slowly deepening acquaintance, coffee is now my lord and master. Also something about how nice the Newtown market is, how convenient it is to the Indian and non-Indian supermarkets, and how trying to shop at all three of those places has taught me the absolute limit of what I can carry up a hill without something wheeled.
2. Something about how much I like film society, and about how different the comedic styles of the last three films I saw there are:
His Girl Friday. Wow, my 'The gender roles were of their time' filter was broken that weekend. Not to mention my 'people nearly getting hit by gunfire is funny' filter. Still enjoyed approximately half of it, and I wish I'd been in a state to enjoy the rest: hopefully next time, because it's the kind of thing that'll surely return. Fast-talking Hollywood classic.
Shadows in Paradise. Finnish romantic comedy. Central question: will the main characters be able to intuit their own and each other's desires without ever actually talking about them? Somehow, over the course of its first half, the reserved intense mustachioed awkwardness of the male protagonist becomes hilarious. Except when it's tragic.
Housebound. New Zealand deadpan, not the same as Finnish deadpan. The main character's stare is just as intense as male protagonist's in Shadows in Paradise, but much blunter; she's impatient in the extreme with a) the world and all its inhabitants, b) being on house arrest, c) having a mother who insists on speaking to her all the time, and d) the possibility that a ghost may be on something like house arrest there too. The film alternates between leaning with gusto into horror-movie doom-signalling tropes (Loom, goes the house, loooom!) and puncturing them, while keeping the question of what precisely is going on batting intelligently back and forth through the air like a shuttlecock, as the main character and her mother learn to tolerate each other again. (Also, in another fine tradition of Kiwi humour, there's a gleeful twenty percent more gore than necessary).
3. Something about the highly endangered white abalone, sea snail, Mexican/Californian relative of the paua, which I gave a small presentation about last week. Although I was pretty well flustered for the presentation, I had the distinction of being the only person in the class to choose a marine mollusc. We had four two-minute population viability analyses on the kakapo, which made me quite glad that I'd dropped my first idea for my presentation, which had been the kakapo. (Even if I do have strong feelings about their population viability. They're so deliberate! So quizzical! The most cat-like of parrots!)
Good luck, white abalone. You're going to need it. (Not just because you aren't a cat-like parrot; also, because there were only 1600 of you remaining in the wild as of the turn of the millennium and you aren't positioned densely enough to breed).
4. Something about All the Fishes Come Home To Roost, by Rachel Manija Brown.
When I was first told, at quite a young age and after about three books, that James Herriot wasn't the real name of the writer of the James Herriot memoirs, I felt a bit betrayed. Partly because some of the anecdotes in those books full of larger-than-quite-plausible anecdote were specifically concerned with the names of people, (Siegfried Farnon is the one I remember), and so the fictionalisation was clearly sending out tendrils below the surface. Also, it just hadn't occurred to me before that he might be anyone but James Herriot.
All The Fishes Come Home To Roost, a memoir about the author's childhood spent with her parents on the ashram of five-messiahs-for-the-price-of-one guru Meher Baba, begins by feeling more anecdotal than real. A jeep can only be driven once it has accumulated three reasons why nobody in their right minds should drive it. No inhabitant of the ashram is more plausible than Siegfried Farnon. But the book crests slowly into hilariousness as the characters fill in behind the anecdotes and it becomes apparent that, though the anecdotes have been concentrated, they really haven't been exaggerated. The book crests, and at a certain point it breaks, because the kind of childhood where all available figures of authority are ignoring or else abetting anecdotes like that is horrible and dangerous, and the implications take a long time to stop getting worse.
The thing which really makes the book work for me is that it includes the story of its own writing. It includes the author trying to work out what on earth her parents had been thinking, and the parents disagreeing about parts of it, and the process of coming to feel like writing it.
And now I want to find elegant concluding review-ish sentence, but on the other hand, it is eleven in the evening. It's a good book. It is extremely funny in a way that doesn't make it feel one bit less real.
(There, that's a more conclusion-ish sentence than I had before I wrote that I wasn't going to have one. Almost always, if I have typed something like, "Now I will stop editing this and go to bed" in a post or a letter, it becomes untrue, I go back and edit it for at least ten more minutes. Now it is eleven sixteen. And I will stop editing this. And go to bed).
5. To The Chapel Perilous just turned up on my university hold shelf. Yay interlibrary loan!
6. Other things I hadn't started to write posts about: writing seems stalled. But then, it often does. (But then, it often is). Family boardgaming is being excellent, Pandemic Legacy becomes wildly satisfying instead of wildly frustrating after you've spent a year getting better at regular Pandemic. And there was also some family Steven Universe, because![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ablackart hadn't watched beyond season one. Oh, Peridot.
But here, I've deceived myself into writing all these entries using a structure where I can stop at any time. Win.
Entries:
1. 'There's coffee in the cupboard again'. To be followed by something about how, after four years of slowly deepening acquaintance, coffee is now my lord and master. Also something about how nice the Newtown market is, how convenient it is to the Indian and non-Indian supermarkets, and how trying to shop at all three of those places has taught me the absolute limit of what I can carry up a hill without something wheeled.
2. Something about how much I like film society, and about how different the comedic styles of the last three films I saw there are:
His Girl Friday. Wow, my 'The gender roles were of their time' filter was broken that weekend. Not to mention my 'people nearly getting hit by gunfire is funny' filter. Still enjoyed approximately half of it, and I wish I'd been in a state to enjoy the rest: hopefully next time, because it's the kind of thing that'll surely return. Fast-talking Hollywood classic.
Shadows in Paradise. Finnish romantic comedy. Central question: will the main characters be able to intuit their own and each other's desires without ever actually talking about them? Somehow, over the course of its first half, the reserved intense mustachioed awkwardness of the male protagonist becomes hilarious. Except when it's tragic.
Housebound. New Zealand deadpan, not the same as Finnish deadpan. The main character's stare is just as intense as male protagonist's in Shadows in Paradise, but much blunter; she's impatient in the extreme with a) the world and all its inhabitants, b) being on house arrest, c) having a mother who insists on speaking to her all the time, and d) the possibility that a ghost may be on something like house arrest there too. The film alternates between leaning with gusto into horror-movie doom-signalling tropes (Loom, goes the house, loooom!) and puncturing them, while keeping the question of what precisely is going on batting intelligently back and forth through the air like a shuttlecock, as the main character and her mother learn to tolerate each other again. (Also, in another fine tradition of Kiwi humour, there's a gleeful twenty percent more gore than necessary).
3. Something about the highly endangered white abalone, sea snail, Mexican/Californian relative of the paua, which I gave a small presentation about last week. Although I was pretty well flustered for the presentation, I had the distinction of being the only person in the class to choose a marine mollusc. We had four two-minute population viability analyses on the kakapo, which made me quite glad that I'd dropped my first idea for my presentation, which had been the kakapo. (Even if I do have strong feelings about their population viability. They're so deliberate! So quizzical! The most cat-like of parrots!)
Good luck, white abalone. You're going to need it. (Not just because you aren't a cat-like parrot; also, because there were only 1600 of you remaining in the wild as of the turn of the millennium and you aren't positioned densely enough to breed).
4. Something about All the Fishes Come Home To Roost, by Rachel Manija Brown.
When I was first told, at quite a young age and after about three books, that James Herriot wasn't the real name of the writer of the James Herriot memoirs, I felt a bit betrayed. Partly because some of the anecdotes in those books full of larger-than-quite-plausible anecdote were specifically concerned with the names of people, (Siegfried Farnon is the one I remember), and so the fictionalisation was clearly sending out tendrils below the surface. Also, it just hadn't occurred to me before that he might be anyone but James Herriot.
All The Fishes Come Home To Roost, a memoir about the author's childhood spent with her parents on the ashram of five-messiahs-for-the-price-of-one guru Meher Baba, begins by feeling more anecdotal than real. A jeep can only be driven once it has accumulated three reasons why nobody in their right minds should drive it. No inhabitant of the ashram is more plausible than Siegfried Farnon. But the book crests slowly into hilariousness as the characters fill in behind the anecdotes and it becomes apparent that, though the anecdotes have been concentrated, they really haven't been exaggerated. The book crests, and at a certain point it breaks, because the kind of childhood where all available figures of authority are ignoring or else abetting anecdotes like that is horrible and dangerous, and the implications take a long time to stop getting worse.
The thing which really makes the book work for me is that it includes the story of its own writing. It includes the author trying to work out what on earth her parents had been thinking, and the parents disagreeing about parts of it, and the process of coming to feel like writing it.
And now I want to find elegant concluding review-ish sentence, but on the other hand, it is eleven in the evening. It's a good book. It is extremely funny in a way that doesn't make it feel one bit less real.
(There, that's a more conclusion-ish sentence than I had before I wrote that I wasn't going to have one. Almost always, if I have typed something like, "Now I will stop editing this and go to bed" in a post or a letter, it becomes untrue, I go back and edit it for at least ten more minutes. Now it is eleven sixteen. And I will stop editing this. And go to bed).
5. To The Chapel Perilous just turned up on my university hold shelf. Yay interlibrary loan!
6. Other things I hadn't started to write posts about: writing seems stalled. But then, it often does. (But then, it often is). Family boardgaming is being excellent, Pandemic Legacy becomes wildly satisfying instead of wildly frustrating after you've spent a year getting better at regular Pandemic. And there was also some family Steven Universe, because
ablackart hadn't watched beyond season one. Oh, Peridot.
