To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive

I have "The Way You Look Tonight" stuck in my head. As songs to have stuck in your head go, it's not a bad one. However, on the "just the way you look tonight" phrase, it's started modulating over to "I have been changed for good" from Wicked's "For Good," and that's just odd.

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In other news, I'm about to look like a hobo for a week, 'cause I just had to duct tape over a hole in the sole of my boot. Since winter doesn't seem to be letting up any time soon, looks like I'll have to either buy new boots or get these fixed over spring break next week. (Ha. "Spring." I'm starting to believe spring is a myth, and my memories of previous springs are just delusions perpetuated by my warmth- and sunlight-starved brain.)

Argh! Cherish the Ladies are playing with the Nashville Symphony in two weeks. Why must all the cool stuff always come when I can't go home for a weekend? (Well, okay, Wicked fortuitously fell on Labor Day, but still. I missed Avenue Q last year, and I think there was another symphony performance I wanted to see that I couldn't.)

I need to get TPAC to take me off their mailing list. It only makes me jealous.

What is this? Since when does it stay so freaking cold in Nashville? ARGH. And the snow predicted for tomorrow night is supposed to accumulate up to 4" and hang around through the weekend. BAH HUMBUG.

However, as long as it's gone from the interstate by the time I head back to school this weekend, I guess I can deal. While complaining loudly, anyway. Knoxville had better be warmer.

(Ooof. Speaking of school, I should get on that whole "developing an argument for the fourth chapter of my thesis" I had plans for this week. My advisor suggested something to do with the metaphor at the end of Bishop's "At the Fish Houses" for a starting point of comparison, which seems as good as any. He also suggested looking at essays by Lyn Hejinian, which I have not quite gotten around to yet. My other thought is that this is a.) a chapter about language, and b.) the last chapter, and maybe I can just chuck the theoretical background and do close readings of Boland's language until a point emerges. This seems a bit like cheating, though. I need to go back through my notes in Zotero.)

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A hilarious video I found on YouTube last night: What if George Lucas restored Singin' in the Rain?

Hooray! I finally found the point I'm going to make in this section of my third chapter after searching for it all day!*

Now, if I can just elucidate it before my brain shuts off for the night...

Also, I appear to have become a tenor in the last several hours. Possibly a tenor who occasionally shapeshifts into a seal. *bark bark*

* Uhhhh, well, minus a few hours of vidding, anyway. What can I say, most of my source material came in to the library today, and it was just lying there, calling to me. I couldn't help myself. And now I only have about twenty seconds scattered here and there that need footage, which, let's face it, I'm going to go down and get from the library tomorrow, because I am weak. But the whole project puts a smile on my face every time I think about it, so that's a good thing, right?

You know you're sick when you're willing to head to the grocery store at 2 PM on a Friday afternoon, the day before snow is called for*, over a route which requires negotiating a giant clusterfrak of a road closure, all in order to get kleenex.

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I remembered today why I really like working at the scholarly journal I help edit. We're currently reading through the first round of proofs, and I got to read a fabulous article about the "secular faith" in fictional worlds and narratives of history in Braudel, Auerbach, and Tolkien. On some level, this is basically what I always end up writing about in my own scholarship, from the thesis to the Millay paper of late. (Well, it helps that Braudel's ideas and postcolonial theory are fairly incestuous, and...apparently I've fallen by default into postcolonial scholarship. Don't look at me; I just wanted to write about Irish stuff, and that's where I've landed.)

Anyway, I almost certainly would never have read this on my own, but I'm glad I've read it (and fixed its typos and formatting errors). :)


* For those not from the south, any time snow is forecast, everyone down here--and I do mean everyone--rushes out to the grocery store to stock up on bread and milk. It's a ritual akin in ubiquity to, I dunno, high school graduation or something, despite the fact that being truly snowbound around here happens maybe once every couple decades.

Good day today. I planned out my lesson for Monday (when I am getting videotaped for observation purposes--I feel like I should be more nervous than I am), wrote a page on my thesis, spent thirty minutes writing the ficlet in the last post, and then watched I, Robot, which I had somehow managed to miss since it came out. I'm not quite sure why; I think perhaps I was abroad at the time? Anyway, it was so good! Yeah, there was some preachiness at the end, but until then, I was riveted. I'm making room for this sucker in my class next semester! I'm tempted to make them read one of the stories and do a comparison to the movie, but I've already got "The Last Question" on the list, and there's only so much Asimov I can stomach. (I really like TLQ, but mostly his prose stylings make me want to beat my head against a wall.) That would've worked brilliantly for my context unit this semester, though. Wish I'd thought of that.

My opinion of the movie may be somewhat influenced by the fact that Chi McBride, aka Emerson Cod, played a large supporting role, and he was totally channeling Emerson. Hee. As well, there may be the fact that the last three movies I've rented from Netflix--Little Miss Sunshine, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and The Science of Sleep have all been so bad that I couldn't even finish them. I've decided that I'm just not cut out to appreciate indie and/or French-inspired movies. I just end up wanting to throttle everyone in them. Give me my sci-fi films and romantic comedies. I am so bourgeois, I know.

But anyway, back to my good day--I just remembered that we gain an hour tonight. WOOT.

Finally, have some sheep, courtesy of my mom.

Seriously? A freeze watch tomorrow (well, tonight)? Seriously? Come on. It's October! It's not even the end of October! Last week it was in the eighties, and now it's struggling to hit 50 and freezing. What is this?

I DEMAND AN AUTUMN.

A picture of my autumnal decorations, since it finally feels like fall here:

( Leeeeeaves )

Granted, it only feels moderately cool here (it's 70 now, I think) because of the rain, which is really kind of amazing at the moment. I just checked the radar, and the entire thing for fifty miles in all directions is green and yellow. In the west, the rain extends nearly to Memphis, which means...it'll be raining all day, pretty much.

Good thing all I have schedule for today is paper-writing. Crossing my fingers I can knock this thing out before student conferences suck up all my mental energy starting next week.

I bought a new pair of headphones yesterday. They are replacing the old ones, which are at least seven years old by now and probably more like ten, and which finally died the other day. (Well, if I get the angle of the jack juuuust right I can hear out of both ears, but it's become more trouble than $10 for a new pair is worth to me.) Anyway, with the new headphones, I discovered some songs I acquired relatively recently (like, within the past year) have bass parts. Who knew! Apparently my old ones had been cutting out anything below a certain hertz. It's like getting new songs for free!

Cheap thrills, folks, cheap thrills.

ANYWAY. I watched the first season of Spaced tonight. (It's a British show; the seasons are only seven episodes long, and apparently there were only two of them. Boo.) I admit, the first couple episodes, I was sort of, "Uhhh...this is weird and not entirely funny," but by the third episode, something clicked and I was really enjoying it. And that last episode, particularly the bit at the end with Daisy and Tim dancing? AWWWWW. I'm a complete sucker for the relationship-of-convenience trope, but those two are completely charming even without it.

I maintain that it's very much like an urban, British version of Corner Gas with an actual romantic plot. So, uh, not much like CG at all, except for the similar style, with the cutaways to imagined scenes and continuous comic book/sci-fi references. My other thought was that it's a version of Friends with dorks, but I haven't seen more than about half an episode of Friends, so I'm not sure about that comparison. It does kind of feel more like "Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson Make a Sitcom" than an actual sitcom, but I think that's because a.) the actors are obviously enjoying it so much that it comes through even when the characters aren't necessarily supposed to be happy at the moment, and b.) the stylization of it, with everything that happens being over-dramatized for comic effect.

At any rate, I'm definitely looking forward to S2. Although I could live without Martha.

...is when a person who wears glasses needs to repair part of his or her set of spectacles.

(I have somehow lost the screw that holds in one of the nosepads on my current pair. I attempted to substitute a screw from my older pair--using only one, squinted eye, because the astigmatism in my left eye makes it basically useless for close work without my glasses--but apparently it's a different size. Now I am using duct tape until I can make it somewhere that sells such items, hopefully tomorrow after work at the journal.)

WOE.