Because copying my sister always makes life better, I'm going to try to keep track of the books, plays, etc. that I've

I've been busy trying to be an adult, so this entry will be a bit on the long side. ( Cut for the sake of your friends' page. )
In other news, I'm not taking a class Term 3. Technically, I'm doing an independent research study on New Age religions, including interviews and ethnography. It's a 4500 level 6-credit course. Yikes. I'm excited though. I'm tried or typing so perhaps I'll update again later. Ciao, my sistahs. ;)

I brought one piece in progress and my actual project to painting today. Prof freaked out and kept coming back to my area to talk about the piece that I wasn't working on. Eventually, near the end of class, he offered  to buy it.

I feel squishy inside. :)

These are kind of huge and poor quality because I'm too tired to put nice stuff together right now. ( What I've done with my life this term... )

I haven't updated in a while because I've been a busy little bee lately, having read four books and having three painting projects going on right now. 

Our current assignment for painting is all about fleshtones. We had to select an historical nudey painting from the Baroque or Renaissance to copy and then we have to tattoo the flesh. Yikes. So, because I'm certifiable, I decided to do a Ruben painting of the Madonna, Christ, Elizabeth, and John the Baptist. I've cropped it so that it's the Baby Jesus (sans most of his legs). After some initial frustration, the flesh tones are coming around nicely. For the tattoos, I'm going to be putting a dollar sign on the baby's bottom and a swastika on the Madonna's breast. My warped logic that made no sense to the roommate on medical leave and caused her to yet again say I'm weird/a freak after explaining it, is that originally the swastika was a symbol of positive things, good luck, etc. in both Asian and Native American culture. It has, as we all know, been tainted and twisted in the modern western world to be a symbol of fascism. The dollar sign is a blatant representation of capitalism, nestled comfortably on the big pudgy baby flesh on little Jesus. Originally, the thoughts of capitalist thinkers weren't necessarily malicious and indeed, many capitalist adventures have roots in altrustic or postive ideas but, like the swastika, the meaning and reasoning has been twisted. So, in a nut shell, facism is nurturing capitalism via the Madonna and Christ. I have some religious tones and opinions obviously, but like in crit, I'm not going to start harping unrationally because I'm a bitter, cynical person. I realize that and I don't really care to offend anyone. Besides, the people who would be offended without listening to an explanation or being able to discuss the matter civilly, well... they wouldn't get it even if I tried. The rest of you are brilliant (or, again, bitter) enough, I think, to grasp what I'm going for.


Next! Books that I've read while I've been away from you lovelies inclue A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray, The Dangerous Lord by Sabrina Jeffers (my first *REAL* romance novel, thanks to a book exchange with Miss Mandy!), Ghost of a Chance by Katie Marsh, and Blood is the New Black by Valerie Stiver. Of all of them, Blood if the New Black was my favorite (it also felt like the most "grown up" of the four). Then again, I'm the chick that got abnormally angry at the end of The Devil Wears Prada because the bint made the wrong choice (and yes, I'm still angry :P)



My plans ifor tomorrow include getting up early to go to the bank, taking the present roommate to the mall, having a geological study session with Miss Beth, and writing a paper for my Ancient Mesoamerica class. I also need to finish my internship paper, type my notes for Art History, organize the Pi Gamma Mu and Lambda Alpha inductions, both of which are next week (why am I President of two honor societies?), and clean the house because its dirty. Oh, and I need to start planning for the fun filled week of obligation I have coming up. Yep, that's right. I get to spend my entire Spring Break in Cincinnati with relatives. Aren't you jealous? Wait, wait, here's the best part... my birthday is that week. I haven't had to spend my birthday dressing and putting a drunken mother to bed, listening to complaints about how "book learnin'" isn't natural for women, and that whenever something goes wrong with someone in the family, SOMEHOW it's my fault. Oh, and I'm going to hell because I'm a lesbian/whore/democrat/etc. Okay, so the Democrat part is true... the others. Yeah, well, that would require talking to me and screaming is ever so much more fun...


Wow, I really hadn't intended for this post to be angsty and filled with ranting. Oh - I almost forgot. Tomorrow night Mandy, Carly, Briar and I are having an Audrey Hepburn party. I bought some champagne today and I need to get some chocolate and strawberries tomorrow sometime. We're going to be watching Roman Holiday, Sabrina, and Breakfast at Tiffany's. I'm super excited, although I'm pretty such Mandy's going to be upset at the lack of rake-ish men. OH WELL. :)

And, for your enjoyment, the truth has finally come out:
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Hmm, maybe my relatives are on to something with the whole "whore" thing...

First, I'll admit it. I read Twilight and the two books Stephanie Meyer spit out after it. It's like a car wreck, really - it's horrible, you know you shouldn't keep watching... but there's something about its hideousness that you just can't turn away from. Maybe, it's that I'm afraid someday that I, or someone I care about, will be in some sort of devastating accident (i.e. have something equal to  the literary dump that is Twilight be reflected as their greatest work).  Maybe I'm remembering other accidents, of less or maybe greater carnage. Maybe I'm more emotionally involved in the minor players than I thought and am just keeping an eye open to see if they get out okay. Whatever the reason... I'm still there, staring.

Why am I writing an entry solely to complain (note the lack of eloquence, examples, or objectivity - this is not a challenge... this is Decadent Plastic being cranky)? I've been thinking about what one of my English Literature major friends said after she read Eclipse. Stephanie Meyer stresses in this book a connection to Romeo and Juliet, but she tries to put Edward as Romeo and Bella as Juliet. The only relation I can see is that their rash and think that they're in love and that's all that matters. Right. REALLY, though, Meyers does a FANTASTIC job of retelling the Romeo and Juliet story if you take it that....

Romeo = Bella
Rosalind = Edward
Juliet = Jacob
(.... Leah can be Paris, if she wants :P)

This book is an amazing look at, like Bella muses at one point, Rosalind wanted Romeo back and Romeo gladly accepted. I hope to god that Juliet/Jacob will get over Romeo/Bella (and indeed, since Meyer threw in that 'imprinting' business, he's bound to, right?), despite Romeo/Bella's assurance that Juliet (or, really, herself) will never recover from the pain of loosing "Romeo/Edward."

The audience of this book is another thing that bothers me in that I feel as if they're too young. Countless 13 year-olds are blogging, writing AU nasty lemony fan-fictions, and shouting from the rooftops how great these books are. Maybe it's because I'm a bonafide farm girl with an old school and prudish moral code but... the third book, New Moon, has several chapters devoted to our heroine begging the hero to have sex with her and attempting to seduce him/trick him into having sex with her (because apparently once men start kissing there's nothing that can stop them, those virtue-less pigs! Edward, of course, is different and after some light groping is able to defend not his, but HER honor by stopping. Gag me.).  Now, anyone that knows me know that I'm a go-with-the-flow, laid back, vegetarian, animal rights activist, tree-hugging, sex-ed loving, democrat girl but... my children would not be allowed to read this series at 13. It romanticizes death, it pushes the idea that without a man life's not worth living, and it's telling them that you don't have real love until you have sexual love. Okay, so the entire series has a symbolic virginity/purity-love/lust/vampirism undertone going on that very few people seemed to have picked up on... but this is the first time it's said outright and in a poorly portrayed way - go seduce your boyfriend, it'll mean your loves complete and you can die happy. WTF.


On the other end... Twilight was not an awful young adult book. That's why it' popularity exploded. It seems like perhaps Ms. Meyer's editors were a little too hasty in putting a new book on shelves and spinning a profit - it seems like a lot of crap that should have been edited was left in the book and it make her writing take on a poorer quality (I've never seen an author regress that much so quickly). I think the same thing happened to J.K. Rowling - once she became popular and her works became a multi-million dollar franchise... well... the last three Harry Potter books kind of blew. Hardcore. It was like she realized at the last minute that, shit, I actually have a plot to accomplish...! Anyway, point being... Twilight became too popular, too quickly and the editors might have taken a nap on the book instead of saying, "Uh, hey, Steph? This part about the high school chick trying to seduce her boyfriend and like... griding up on him all over his bed? Uh... do you know who your audience is?"


But I'm an old lady, I've been told this before. It's just... I expect so much from my authors and sometimes, they thrill beyond my wildest dreams. Other times... well... they sell their souls to Warner Brothers.

Last night there was a lunar eclipse. It was pretty sweet, for the five minutes I ran outside and froze myself to stare at the sky. The moon had this creepy red tint when it was reappering - like those horror flicks where someone gets bitten/stabbed/mauled in water and the blood is loosely floating around in little clouds? Yeah, that's what it looked like to me.

My brother called last night during the eclipse, though, and we actually talked. I think it might have been my being cranky and not sticking to the normal script my family uses to communicate but he asked me about post-graduation plans (as his script requires) and I said I didn't have a clue but this, this, and this were the things I was looking at. He teased me about being a bleeding-heart liberal, actually encourged me to do what I wanted, and we talked seriously about mom for once.  I tried once before to talk to him about her and his response had been that she's a big girl and she can take care of herself, but this time he not only listened but asked my opinion on whether or not I thought she'd be fit to fly to Cincinnati in April. I said that she probably should talk to her doctors about it and then I made some snappy comment about our family's inability to talk about things/beat around the bushes/etc. and he laughed and said that that did seem to be our motto. Whoa.

My brother always seems so sad, even underneath the script though. I guess I understand it, his life isn't what he thought it would be. He has the masculine equivalent to the female problem Betty Friedan wrote about. He's a lawyer, yes, but he works for some big corporate bank thing. He'd like to get a job doing something other than making rich men richer, but with student loans and a child to care for, it's not a possibility for them. Which, in a weird sense, makes me feel better about myself. I know, horrible selfish prat that I am, turning it around to reflect on my life but... Michael was always the "good one." Our entire lives, I've been compared to Mike. Mike's a star athlete, Mike's going to law school, Mike listens to mommy and votes Republican (after the whole him-being-shunned-for-voting-Gore incident), etc. etc. etc. He met his wife sophomore year of college and while they had a minor breakup for a bit, they got married once he passed the bar and she got her M.A., she quit her job to raise their daughter, and so on. Mike's always done what he's supposed to. On the other hand, my family has always seen me as the rebel. I'm blunt and I've almost always told the people I'm intimate with what I think and how I feel, as far back as when the time when, at 6 or 7, I packed my father's suitcase and thew it into the driveway because of the way he treated my mother and I. My mom likes to alternate between telling me I'm a whore and a dyke, and I always got into trouble with the nuns at school for being too intellectual and opinionated. I don't know where I'm going, I just know that I'm going somewhere and until last night, I really thought that was a bad thing. Now, I think my chances of survival are pretty decent. Ha, I guess if you don't expect too much from life, you can be happy with wherever you land.

I'm working on two paintings right now. The first is old lady hands with rosary beads, one that I thought that I'd ruined on Monday night but, upon reviewing it last night, I guess it's not so bad. The other, the one that I'm having a crit on Tuesday concerning, is bothering me. Granted, I've only done the underpainting and all of my paintings bother me in that stage, I'm more concerned with the subject matter. It's based, loosely, on a photo I saw of a tulip vase on its side with water pouring over the table they're on. Nothing I do seems to please Marc. Oh, well. Six weeks left, yeah?

I've been considering buying (pun unintended) into the Phoneix Alchemy perfume crazy by purchasing/trading Imps (little samples of the perfumes they make).

I looked at the site for a whole ten minutes this morning and decided I'd like to begin with these, the *'d ones being the six I would order first:

Sugar Moon
Arcana
Belle Epoque*
Bess
Black Forest*
Black Pearl
Blood
Blood Kiss
Dana O'Shee
Dee*
Eclipse
Ephemera
The Hesperides
Kill-Devil*
Lurid
Morgause*
Ouija*


I'm not sure, though, and this would have to be after I bought my ticket for California.

First off, sorry about the quiz-death. I wanted some sort of space-filler and picked the wrong one.

Looking through the course catalogue, I think my last two Elmira College classes are going to be:

This course is a selective study of British, American, and European works of horror fiction and film from the late eighteenth century to present, with a focus on the political implications of the portrayal of gender and sexuality. Lecture and discussion topics include feminist criticism, nature as a cultural construct, the gothic genre, sadism, masochism, the cultural construct of gender, patriarchy, fetishism, the uncanny, the monster as cultural construct, lesbianism, homosexuality, heterosexuality, the other, fantasy, the gaze, objectifcation, psychoanalytic criticism, and the politics of horror. Readings to be selected from such authors as the Marquis de Sade, Edgar Allen Poe, E.T.A. Hoffman, Charlotte Bronte, Sheridan Le Fanu, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, Charlotte Mew, Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter, Anne Rice, and Clive Barker.



This course will serve as a forum for the open discussion and examination of American popular culture: cinema, music, television, shopping, make-up, virtual reality, toys, etc. Our approach will be threefold: We will begin by examining the distinction between "high culture" and "popular culture." Who makes the distinctions? How are the distinctions made and why? We will then address what some critics have called the "gothic" elements in American culture: things such as horror films, real TV, traumatic talk shows, etc. By way of comparative analysis our aim will be to learn and discuss what the American public seems to cherish, as well as what it represses.