is a blog by Brendan
Afer at least a dozen different samples, the Gender Genie firmly and consistently identifies me as a girl.
Yup.
Update 1947 hrs:
Well, don’t feel anxiety about this. I went to the site and typed in a Hamlet soliloquy and guess what — Shakespeare was a girl!
Deb
How many two-year-olds have their own weblogs? (Not enough!) If you don’t already read The Daily Zoe, you should, as it will consistently and significantly improve your outlook on life. It’s hard to feel bad about your day when you see the sheer amounts of attention and love surrounding that kid. Bonus: life-threatening cuteness!
Oh, and remind me to post something else about babies when I get home.
While I was looking up IMDB stuff for Ms. D____ just now, I noticed that one of her newest roles is the lead in a film adaptation of Shopgirl. I picked that book up for a dollar at the same time as Microserfs and read it just afterward, so that caught my attention.
I can’t assume that anybody out there has actually read Shopgirl, because I don’t recall it doing spectacular business and I doubt it would have seen print if not for its author’s celebrity. Steve Martin plots well and his jokes are rare but good, but a) nobody actually prints standalone novellas and b) it’s pretty lame prose. He’s a comedy writer, not a novelist, so he apparently never learned things like “show, don’t tell.”
That said, the book will probably translate well to a movie, I applaud the casting of Jimmy Fallon as Jeremy, and it’s kind of cool that Martin’s writing the screenplay himself. But even without knowing the plot, doesn’t anybody else find it a little weird that he’s cast himself as a romantic lead opposite Claire Danes?
About half the books I requested from the library arrived yesterday (and the magic Library Computer telephoned to tell me so!), so after I got off work I biked on down to get them. About a block away, I got a flat tire.
I really should have had them replace the tires when I got it tuned, but I thought I’d save a little money and just get new tubes. Smart me. I’ll take it in this afternoon and get two new ones–the back tire is the one that popped, but I’m sure the front isn’t far behind.
Anyway, I walked the rest of the way to the library and picked up another packful of pages (Lovecraft and Lem, both of whom I’m trying for the first time, and more) and started the trek back. A few blocks on, I noticed that this store called Twice Told Books was actually open–it had always been closed when I passed before. So I decided to check it out, locked my bike to a parking meter, walked in and was eaten.
The books were so dense there. The shelves weren’t nearly enough to hold them all, so they were stacked on top, piled at the bottom, stacked on top of the piles at the bottom, everything. It smelled like dry paper and glue, exactly like the stacks at the old EKU library, before they tore it up and made it big and glassy. I spent a lot of evenings there in middle school, while Mom was earning her Rank I (again), and read a lot of books. The shelves and the overstocking and the smell were all the same, and it was a pretty memory-intensive experience.
They apparently live to buy old sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks, too, and I picked up a lot of them–Le Guin, de Camp, all books about which I’ve thought “I should own that” but never got around to buying. I even got a book I’d been thinking about lately but never thought I’d find again, because I had no memory of the author or title, only the cover illustration. It’s called The Sword and The Satchel, as it turns out, which I learned when I found its cover staring up at me from one of the aforementioned piles.
They had to kick me out when they closed. I was enthralled, and for the first time I honestly wish I wasn’t leaving Bardstown Road. The music stores and comic shop and ice cream I could do without, but I’m going to sneak back to that bookstore whenever I can.
Think they’d give me a job?
I love my microfiber pants. They make me feel like karate.
In a convincing segue, I googled for kendo+Louisville this morning and found out that my new school has an aikido club, which is really interesting. I was always a little jealous of how good Ian got at aikido while he was in Richmond, and I would have liked to go to classes with my uncle John if I’d had the money and time in Danville. For ten bucks a month in grad school, though, I might just be able to do it. Anybody else want to go along?
Yesterday I learned from Maria that if you fall asleep at a boring meeting, lecture, movie, ancetera, it means you haven’t been getting enough sleep, even if you think you have. If you really actually don’t have “sleep debt”–if you’ve been getting your statistical eight hours a night–you can’t and won’t fall asleep during the day.
Since that means I’ve been constantly in debt for a good six years now, that’s a little worrisome, but it’s also good to know. Hanging out with Maria is a process of continually finding out new things about biology and discovering that half the things I thought I knew were wrong. I guess that should be embarrassing, but really it’s pretty cool. My brain is getting bigger! (Inner Maria: No it’s not!)
Two hours of sleep last night, as I stupidly stayed up until three before I even realized that I still had to do my homework. I say “stupidly” because I wasn’t even staying up for any specific purpose–I just hung out with Michelle and Jessica and David, beatboxing and rhapsodizing about the Neptunes. That’s college, I guess, but then I thought I was supposed to get good at time management someday. Ha ha ha!
That wasn’t exactly the best night to skimp on sleep, either, as today was a big day: not only our biggest crowd at Chalk Circle, but my first ever show as the drummer for Grandma’s Genius! And it rocked! We’d practiced together on exactly one song, which we didn’t end up playing, and the PA was crap, which made for a frustrating beginning. As it turns out, though, once we got started we had a pretty flawless forty minutes. We’re good at this!
Then, just as we finished our last song (BNL, “Brian Wilson,” where I get to go crazy thundergod at the end), the first drops of rain started to fall… all over the band that had earlier refused to swap us time slots.
That’s right. God loves Grandma’s Genius more.
(Also, found while searching for Neptunes sites: Conch is their specialty!)
I went with Jon, Amanda, Amanda’s sister Kelly and the one and only Artdrey to a Legends game on Friday, then to see Spirited Away on Sunday, and in between…
There are apparently a lot of Beaux Arts Balls thrown by architecture departments all over the country, but the one in Lexington is the biggest, or so they tell me. People put on costumes and go underground and get physically rearranged by the music, and then there’s girls in fashion… things, and after that there are guys who are pretending to be girls.
I’d never been to a drag show before (although I have watched To Wong Foo several times), but I wasn’t really surprised. There were a couple of ladies who were definitely men, and then there was one who was fairly androgynous, and then… there was Jenna.
Jenna was beautiful.
Jenna is my soulmate.
Jenna, if you’re out there, know that I’m out here too, and no, I’m not single, but dammit I could be.
Next topic! I should emphasize more that this was a costume party, as in Halloween costumes, only in April, so with more skin. There were some intricate and pretty ones there, and then the size-over-intricacy ones (meet Mister Pez Dispenser!) and then there were just people out to make their fetishes public.
I came to the conclusion, that night, that costume parties exist to let people show off the way they really want other people to see them. The dude with the tux and the wolf mask wants to sweep you away; the girl with the angel wings and garter belt wants to be touched and untouchable; the guy with that much metal in his face… he’s just doin’ his thing, man.
So if this is the case, I find it terribly appropriate that Audrey and I wore brightly colored rayon old-person jogging suits. They were worth more than a few compliments from other partygoers, and they were the most comfortable things I’ve ever had the eye-grinding displeasure of wearing–the Secret of the Mallwalkers! They were also two terribly comfortable outfits on two terribly comfortable personalities. Even if, um, they did hurt to look at. The analogy breaks down there, I guess.
Part of me wanted to come back in jewelry and a big hat and my soon-to-be patchy pants, sure, but mostly I just had a great time in an elastic waistband, hovering next to my girl and being lifted bodily by the bass. Times that great in pants that swishy are few and far between.
(I’d like to cap off this entry by talking about Spirited Away, but really, can I say anything that hasn’t been said?)
Via Crummy comes a site with screen caps from a bootleg Asian DVD of The Two Towers, glorious subtitles included. A lot of them are just random, but these five are better than anything I could have come up with. The top left one’s a Unix nerd joke. The bottom right one is, somehow, going to be my new desktop wallpaper.
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Today is my sister’s birthday! Caitlan is eighteen! Happy birthday, Caitlan!
In other news, Sumana has frequently plugged Bookfinder, a kickin’ service that, well, finds books. It’s kind of like the “network of bookstores” that Amazon uses to find out-of-print books, only much, much better. I was reading some of her comments on the service and how cool it was, and I kept thinking “gee, I wish I had a rare or used book that I was looking for.”
A couple days later, I was surprised to remember that I WAS looking for such a book, and had been for three years–Orson Scott Card’s short story omnibus, Maps In A Mirror. Bookfinder turned up several copies, all of which were too expensive at the moment, of course, but most of which were still cheaper than the few an Amazon search turned up two years ago.
So I went away satisfied, but came back tonight when I remembered a book that this amazing girl had showed me at a convention. The book is Anthropology, and it’s one of those forced-restriction masterpieces: 101 stories, each 101 words long. What I got to read of it was fantastic, and I wanted my own copy, but I remembered she’d said it was out of print.
Which it is–but tonight I found it for just ten bucks with shipping, and bought it. Thanks to Bookfinder! Hooray, Bookfinder!