Daffnee

Somebody out there really hates my site! That, or someone is trying to mess with my mind by voting me badly on BlogHop (see below), but if someone is, you probably don't realise that any strong reaction will be taken as a good thing. So thank you! At least someone out there cares, and enough to get to the bottom of the page.

I know (or at least I've been told, often) that content is queen, but for a two-month-old blog that started as a means to burn off some serious holiday frustration, please reserve judgement until April rolls around -- when I can get back in touch with my inner programmer and crash my computer again.

I just clued in as to why I thought yesterday's seminar felt off -- it was a glitch in the Matrix. Allow me to explain. I was surrounded by 18 fellow undergraduates, let a Douglas Adams reference go, and heard it go "plonk" instead of the expected "ping" (that's my first use of a Weir-ism so far -- my Modern Critical Theory prof -- just to show my appreciation for the not-too-shabby mark on my last paper). Not a one had heard of him. This isn't just implausible -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is mandatory reading in high school -- but bordering on impossible, causing me great concern because 1) I really can't afford to go crazy right now, 2) many people out there also can't afford to have me go crazy, and 3) I think the stress from just trying to grasp how anyone could live and breathe without being acquainted with Douglas Adams causes me to break out -- quite a feat, considering my skin usually resembles low-quality white bond paper.

Procrastination has driven me to do a lot of things before, but when avoiding work means voluntary physical punishment (exercise, of course!), I really ought to worry. That, and I have a tub and a half of plain yogurt, 7 bananas, 8 oranges and two bags of choy to finish before Friday evening, at which point I get to go home and get stuffed some more. Would anybody be interested in a day-to-day update of my fridge's contents? I could probably use the reminder myself, since the freezer's been frozen shut on my (bar) fridge for so long that I don't remember if there's anything left inside.

Remind me to talk about Grade 8 girls, peer pressure, and teaching my hapless tutor-ee my meagre currency analyst and French skills. Ah, vive la cynique libre.

My English seminar prof hated our presentation on David Auburn and Proof, by the way. Too bad for him -- we had fun dressing up as "semi-hip" mathematicians and making a Wheel of Fortune.

A Pinch of Prowess, everybody's favourite UBC intramural volleyball team, went 1-1 today. << insert mandatory positive spin here >>

I never cease to be amazed that I'm involved in any form of organised sports whatsoever, consider most of my elementary and high-school years consisted of practicing piano, reading, and getting picked on. (No comment as to whether any of the former contributed to the latter, or whether the latter was done by some people I can only characterise as delightfully stupid -- in retrospect.) Yet there I am, outrageously late on a Tuesday night, with unsightly kneepads and screaming threats of impending torture to those who would care to listen just like all the attractive fit people I always despised.

It started with a wall. A twelve-foot wall. (Actually, it started with a desperate physics lab TA asking if I could play Ultimate because his co-ed team was short on girls, but relay races with big piles of bark mulch and transportable walls in front of student union buildings just play nicely into the UBC myth.) To quote a Sicilian: inconceivable!

I broke down in tears three days ago, simply because I forgot all the tell-tale signs that these could be the best days of my life. For example, I'm on a volleyball team called A Pinch of Prowess. It's never going to happen again, is it?

I failed to be productive (just every day before this), so here's my work spilling over; anybody feel like some theological fun?



Hopefully so, because our next contestant is Milton's Paradise Lost.

This term's research paper in English 354C: Milton and the Seventeenth Century asks for a comparison of Milton's Eve and the Fall with what his contemporary drinking buddies thought. Since feminist readings are really easy to do (especially if you happen to be female, as I am), I'm going to do a bit of sitting on the gender-bias fence. Milton's an opinionated guy, so I expect him to be pretty involved in the rather superficial debates they had for fun back then; but I think when it comes to the question of whether Adam and Eve were created equal, he manages to poke fun at everyone while coming up with a nice, tidy solution. The theory ends up sounding a lot like the one physicsts give on the Big Bang, actually -- he seems to argue that before they snacked on those golden apples (the best kind, incidentally -- Top Ten produce on West 10th & Blanca, cheapest Golden Delicious in the Vancouver area), the state of innocence meant that neither Adam nor Eve could be aware of a hierarchy. There's tidbits where Eve makes as though she's been taught (wrongly) that she's inferior, and others where Adam shows he's rather fond of being hand-fed grapes -- but no one explicitly makes any hierarchical comments until after the Fall, when God, Jesus, Raphael, and Adam all go misogynist together.

And guys complain that girls go to the bathroom together. Honestly.

I was going to do a nice rant on Japanese dating games, but since I know nothing about them (and prefer to have valid points in my quip arsenal), the roommate that just stuck her head in the door seems a far easier target.

She wanted essay help; normally, I'd write something on whether that's ethical at all, because it seems like going to a doctor as soon as s/he leaves their clinic for an instant diagnosis, but she set me up with an excellent tutoring job earlier in the year, so my wrath has petered out to a dignified sniff. I wonder if that was planned? She was being very sweet though, offering to work according to my schedule -- even though it's going to be during my sacred breakfast time. Sacred!

Melissa just called and told me I get to dress up as David Auburn tomorrow (see below). Instant flashback to Grade 9 murder mystery birthday parties, where I think I've had to do this "dishevelled writer" gig before.

The comments work! Granted, I expect them to fail at least once a week -- with my personal luck and the stresses put on free services, I need to give Enetation some grace -- but for now, this will hopefully improve personal relations with people I see infrequently. Like Dan.

For all you other happy people, say hi to the starving English student; it won't make me any less hungry, but I don't smile enough as it is.

This is going to turn into a reader's journal for the next few weeks, not so much because I think online book reviews are terribly interesting -- though I find the demise of Oprah's book club strangely amusing -- but because I need to keep track of all the text I'm told to read in a given day. Besides, I live a boring life, and since most of it is dedicated to books now anyway, the logical connection was just waiting to be made.

So, the first piece of literature this week in need of major recapping:



I'm jealous. I took Calculus IV, and I never managed to look like that, even if we ignore ethnicity for the moment.

The only reason I wanted to do this one for my seminar presentation (that seminar itself deserves its own rant sometime, after the course is over and I can be assured that no professorial wrath will be wreaked) was that a play about mathematics would be the only way I could keep pretending I'm still a hard-core physics student. Too bad the math in the play is a) not of the sort I ever got to play around with (prime numbers? sorry, managed to avoid number theory) and b) non-existent. My hopes for differential equations came to naught.

This is a play you could do with a soap box and creative miming, though building a porch in suburban Chicago could be kind of fun too; besides, looking at the props list (wine bottle, bananas, drum sticks) makes me wonder if David Auburn came up with this in a university residence, because I tripped over all that stuff on my way in after dinner. Characters consist of three mathematicians and a currency analyst; considering the number of mathematicians I know and that my mother is an accountant, I was thoroughly happy with the cast introductions.

We meet Catherine and her father, Robert, on the front porch; I'm assuming this is a typical exchange between deadbeat twentysomethings and their parents, having no experience of that sort to draw on. Except, of course, both Cathy and Bob are math geniuses -- and that Robert happens to also be dead. Catherine has a row with Harold Dobbs (he's cited as "Hal" -- I approve, because there's no way a kid with a name like "Harold Dobbs" would not become a math junkie) for rifling through her father's (or his old prof's) notes. Next scene has the currency analyst sister arrive (Claire) to do all those things one expects bossy New York yuppies to do, namely throw parties and proffer bagels in replacement of emotional support when a funeral's going on. Catherine apparently is quite the genius, as we eventually find out; after quitting school after a few months to take care of her increasingly "bughouse" dad (I love that, "bughouse" -- almost as good as "dotty" or "daft"), she starts writing a proof about a prime number theorem (PLEASE?! *sigh*) at night. She finishes, and in a moment of morning-after weakness tells Hal where to find it. Hal, being rather keen on scaling the ivory tower of academia with his "semi-hip" loafers, wants to take the proof for "verification", believing that Robert wrote it (while he was ravingly crazy). Claire, likely on loan from Sex in the City, contributes by being annoying and fashion conscious. Catherine swears a lot.

I think the ending is supposed to be liberating or something -- two geeky math kids poring over an "unelegant" proof is budding romance in this faculty, boys and girls -- but felt like a whimpered compromise. Which might have been the point, I'm not sure -- with my history of presentations, I'll probably come up with an explaination on Tuesday afternoon while in the middle of my rant. Worked terrifically with Milton's Aereopagitica and Stanley Fish, which is something nobody hears very often.

My major points on the theme of "control": a) control is entirely unrelated to responsibility (taking responsibility makes you no more capable of doing anything, except that you now have a title so people can say "it's in your job description") and b) control is given, never taken. Deep, eh?

In other news, my visit to Melissa's studio apartment (basement, actually) makes me feel slightly -- only slightly -- embarassed that I haven't put up a single poster in the six months I've been here; Marta calls it the jail cell look. I think it suits me. In any case, the studio looked like an Ikea showroom, only heavily incensed. Returning to my six-person townhouse and sticky kitchen floor seemed a little less exciting, though having a very tired boyfriend tagging along always improves my day. Even if he's leeching off rice, and trying hard to sabotage my web success so his webcomic Haphazard survives -- oh wait, he already has higher readership.

Monday, I'm ready for you.

I managed to cut both my legs, seperately, on a rusty bedframe this morning. It's really quite attractive, from an appropriate angle.

I break my own heart.

It's a rare day when I can say a good thing about literature that doesn't involve heaps of cranky twentieth-century angst, but here goes: dear Milton, damn straight we don't know how to stop asking for more -- I think I'll call it the Oliver Complex. The "Please, sir, I want some more complex", that is; Adam and Eve suffered from it in Paradise Lost, and I like to think that it's a particular terminal disease of mine. Think of all the things my particular North American consciousness holds dearer than McDonald's: economic growth, scientific progress, higher standard of living, pay raises (I really hope UBC Administration and CUP 2278 are tuning in for this), etc. I started asking people that espoused these values a simple "why" a little while ago, and it's amazing how hostile they can become -- I'm crying on the inside, but that's beside the point. Using my favourite opening to a question, how did we ever convince ourselves that more was better?

Putting it in terms of personal relationships, which happens to be North America's favourite pastime anyway (you got me, I'm trying to start my own reality dating show -- maybe something involving t.a.b.-bowling and the sudden disappearance of former elementary-school classmates' vital organs), doesn't the expectation of happiness defeat itself? Maybe someone can tell me if I have a psychological disease of some sort, but I don't think I can self-monitor my own happiness. So why, intelligent people out there, are we programmed to always expect more? What if I'm bordering into that dangerous red-zone on the far end of the Happy bar, and not know it? I could draw parallels with Paradise Lost and try to tie really grumpy feminist arguments on how the apple revealed Eve's unconscious self-subjugation, but my readership is low enough as it is.

Life works. That's more than enough.

Which is not to say it couldn't be significantly improved with a nice reveleation on the essential link between Eve's potential for procreation and her subsequent punishments after the Fall. Ferguson and I came up with a sure sign one's doing way too much work for an essay; when your sources start referencing each other and you know exactly what connections they're talking about, the chances of distilling the worthless knowledge you have in less than 2000 words are slimmer than me forgetting lines from Star Wars (The Empire Strikes Back, specifically).

Now seems like a seemly time to go offset oncoming depression with tea.

I'm normally a girl with some degree of profound thought -- especially since tonight was a Friday Richmond affair -- but at the moment, the only thing on my mind is that the anonymous student I share a wall with would, if I had my way, quickly discover that this particular cynic knows how to have fun with a flamethrower and hapless victims on an early Saturday morning. Let that be a lesson to those with bad taste in music, and even worse timing.