bookish dreamer

I'm in a nostalgic mood because I'm rewatching Buffy (Season 4 rocks!4eva!) in my free time, just introduced one of my friends to the first episode of Firefly last night, am sorta joining in on the Veronica Mars rewatch my housemate is doing when she has it on and I come home, and basically... it's like TV in the past. Oh and my friend "IL" has me watching Empire's first season because she loves Cookie so. Can't argue with that - the role is so much better for Taraji Henson than her character on Person of Interest. Not that it's perfect - Empire is very much a show about drama. High drama is ridiculous all the time. No one's life is like that. And people have a bad habit of breaking into song (though it's not as bad as Smash). But at least Cookie has some range - is good, bad, beautiful, strong, both generous and selfish in turns. Henson is absolutely fascinating to watch no matter what she's doing.

But since I'm watching "Primeval" I'm feeling all blog-centric. Well that and I had a great conversation with my mom last night about what we put in journals and why we love them so. Even though this isn't a written journal it is a record of pieces of my life, and even though sometimes it's fragments, it's still a record of some kind. Just like every journal is fragmented. I can't tell you how many times I've sat on an airplane writing the first page of my journal for my trip to somewhere ... Japan, Boston, Minnesota. Traveling brings back the introspection in my family apparently.

And Buffy watching.

So, in navel gazing, I had a major birthday. It passed with fanfare of the best kind - planned and executed well, if I do say so myself. There were a hideous number of festive tissue paper pom-poms and garlands made of playing cards, and while there weren't fountains of punch there were several pitchers of sangria that went over incredibly well. Oh, and cupcakes! All of my thinking and obsessing and preparation and anticipation actually worked out incredibly well!

( here's a beautiful picspam of just a couple of images...yes i am infected by instagram aesthetics )

Work has been relatively good this week, which is nice - I'm trying to finish a rough draft of my entire dissertation by the end of November, so we'll see how that goes. It's going to be a close thing. But every time I sit down and read another magazine I feel closer to my source material, and even though I haven't read everything, I've read so many new things that expand my understanding of the conversation happening within the pages of the magazine. And it was a conversation, even if it's hard to hear how people speak back to a printed article. It's pretty awesome.

I went to my second academic SF conference the weekend after my birthday - both fun and a little weird. Lots of cool info about scifi that doesn't always get into the conversation. Did you know that there was a pretty big Mexican Cyberpunk movement in the 1990s? And that First Nations peoples are considering alternative ways of knowing as both SF but also just S (ie: science). One of my professors presented on some of her preliminary work on Korean SF, and a friend presented on this amazing graphic novel where the two women main characters are a spaceship captain and the engineer and they both make love to each other and their ship!

Unfortunately there was also just a little social weirdness. Some of the male grad students I struck up a conversation with were dudebros, and some of the spanish speakers just straight up didn't talk in English in order to exclude the non-spanish speakers from the conversation, but such is life.

I have been *buried* like a crazy person in all kinds of things. Not bad things, not at all, just lots and lots of things one after another.

So I give you life, in photo form (well, and some things that i forgot to take photos of, because i have trouble that way)

( A visit from one of my very favorite people in the world, Tebo. )

( Two of my friends got married, and this is when we took them out to dinner to celebrate after they'd done the ceremony stuff )

( I presented at a Japanese pop culture conference in Minneapolis on Sept 27th! )

( My second chapter, on Japanese magazine covers in the 1960s, got turned in on October 1 )

( I got to go to a departmental faculty meeting and pretend like I know what I'm doing. No, kidding. But I did talk about our upcoming graduate student conference )

( I had a birthday! I am older! Like by a whole year! )

And since then I've started a writing workshop to transform a written piece into an article, assembled my portfolio so I can apply for the 3 (yes, 3) jobs in the U.S. for Japanese literature and culture professors, applied for one of the most prestigious national fellowships available to ppl who work on what I do (and trust me, that was a pain, including two different research statement workshops and one rewrite of a dissertation chapter), had another friend come to visit for 4 days (he doesn't like pictures, but we talked about our projects, watched a ton of movies and tv, and found yummy local places to eat on the cheap), and watched a TON of Gillmore Girls with my housemate.

And since Halloween is coming, I have one more image for you:



this is a skeleton flamingo. to be found in the yard up the street that brought us the two-joseph chreche at Christmas time (found in this picspam about 2/3rds of the way down) I love them. They are awesome. I just need to find a way to make them my friends.

ALLLLMOST made it at midnight (but didn't because LJ's photobucket, while convenient, inverts your photograph order as you upload. So awesome. NOT.) I declare it's still Wednesday because I haven't gone to sleep yet. That works right?

ANYWAY, enough complaining. These are pics from Tahoe and Mokelumne Hill and Jackson (in California) - my latter travels!

tahoe invites you in:




( it truly is a beautiful land )

Dear Diary,

I went to a penis festival. Yep, you read that right. In a little town North of Nagoya called Komaki they have a harvest festival every year that hopefully will bring fertility. Setting aside the patriarchal underpinnings of only celebrating the penis as the active maker of fertility *cough* hello vagina anyone *cough* it was a really amusing day. Lots and lots of foreigners were there, but there were plenty of Japanese too, celebrating, taking pictures, buying penis-shaped food, and drinking shrine sake. And after that? Sam and I went to the Ise Grand Shrine, dedicated to goddess Amaterasu.

I ended up with incredibly painful blisters (by the end o f the night on the second day I literally had tears in my eyes) and sunburn that makes me look like a raccoon (which is why there are no pictures of me on the second day, omg) but had a great time. Our friend Fede brought two of his friends to hang out with us at the festival, and we laughed and were goofy all day. And Sam not only put up with my limping the whole second day, but is still talking to me afterwards – which is a tribute more to his patience than anything else.




( Be warned, here there be wooden and stone penii! (and ok, they're really not so bad) )

So, other than feeling a little weighed down by last week's classwork, I've been working on this plan with Sam for a 20 person thanksgiving. But let me set this up for you -- ovens aren't common in Japan. And in our housing, two burner stoves are also the only thing we've got. So imagine the idea of trying to put together food for 20 people in a regular kitchen (not a small feat) and then cut your number of burners in half and take away your ability to keep things warm (or bake) in the oven.

That being said, Sam's idea was to basically figure out the menu instead of doing potluck (since those kinds of things always end up with people bringing chips from the combini down the street), and then do assignments of dishes to people who could do them. So one guy did all the sweet potatoes, one woman did all the potatoes, I did the stuffing (and the gravy), Sam did the meat (which also, not a turkey, but instead braised pork that was fantastic), and a pumpkin soup for starters AND mulled wine.

( And a good time was had by all! And so I have pictures! )

All in all totally worth the weeks of preparation, the all day shopping excursions, the having to drag heavy (good) smelling food onto the train in the rain, everything. :D

Now though? I'm totally pooped, and am basically going to be watching LOTR and doing nothing for the rest of the day. I hope y'all had good thanksgiving if you celebrate it! And if not, good weekends!

I try to walk myself and the dog past these steps every day or so, just because they're so pretty (and steps! good for the butt! even if we both take them slow!) Tonight at the base of the steps there was a written message that was so sweet I had to share. I have no idea who the writer is, but I think the sentiment is quite lovely.



( click for close up on the writing )

Isn't that just sweet?? I love my neighborhood!

And in other things, those of you who loved cracked out 70s science fiction movies (and really, I can't think of a single one of you who doesn't, right?) last night I watched Zardoz:



which miraculously (fabulously!) has Sean Connery running around in a red diaper and thigh-high leather boots. SO WORTH IT! Just so you know though, in the future, there are no bras. I watched it with mechassninja an our friend Tebo (just call us two bottles of white and a bottle of red ladies), and had like seriously the most fabulous time. Even during the forty minutes of technical difficulties we had to deal with because the world wants us to PAY for the ability to video chat with three windows. Anyway, Tebo was the one who already knew how absolutely marvelous this film was, and so she inflicted introduced it to us. There was so much laughing in the first 15 minutes that I think one of us peed her pants a little. Just, fair warning, if you do try and track this down, be drunk when you watch it. Then the ending may make some strange sort of sense.

Ok, so that was the fun and (un?)productive side of the weekend. On the other side I gave the dog a bath, then cleaned the house (particularly the be-dogged bathroom), finished grading half the essays I have for tomorrow, and read a book about poverty in New York written in the 1880s. So far, so good. Oh, and I made mini-quiches to take for breakfast next week. Num.

I mentioned in my last post that I was doing this project in the Visual Studies class where we had to pick out five items from the Getty special collections around a certain theme, and then show them to the class. It so happened that my partner took photographs of all the items, so I'm throwing them up in a picspam. Why not right?

We chose these because they represented four different forms of disembodiment: the literal act, the photographed spirit, the phenomenon of light, and the conceptually reproduced

( pretty old things )

In honor of the exciting Lupercalia celebration planned for the future at the just being created today kradamcakes, I give you a wolf picspam.

And by picspam I mean, well, PICSPAM. There are more images here than I've dealt with in a long time, and a link at the bottom to the photobucket that contains more. If you like wolves you will like these photos. And if you like the idea of Kradam & Wolves (and in the future, Kradam & mermaids, and possibly other cracked out things), keep your eye on kradamcakes (though probably not quite, you know, today).

Almost all images are pretty large (min 800x400, but lots 1280x1024) so right click and view in new window/save as to your heart's content!

( A gentleman is simply a patient wolf. Lana Turner )

Once upon a time a girl went up to N. Cal to visit her family - there were lots of hugs and a bunch of time spent hanging out with her nephews and parents and even an eclipse! And then she and her mom took a driving adventure back to her house, filled it with lots of wonderful things to make it a warm home, made bunches of good food, and went on adventures. And then, sadly, she had to put her mom back on a train to go home. But in the end, it was kind of a magical Christmas.

( And look, there were pictures! )