(no subject)
Holy crow, what a day. I was so tired that I basically came home and slept for five hours after I finished checking my email, which would bring us up to... now.
Rewind. I finished my paper about an hour before the exam, mostly because I just hit this point where the paper was still a couple of pages short, but... I'd said everything I wanted to say. You know? So I just called it a day.
I did get to the point where I start making up words. Like "paganinity."
Random thought: I hate "Proserpina" and vastly prefer "Persephone." Stupid Romans.
And I read all of Samson Agonistes! (...she says, in that slightly smug, very self-satisfied tone reserved for the accomplishment of things you were supposed to do anyway. Possibly two weeks ago, in fact.) By the way: Samson is an idiot. He marries the Woman of Timna(th) (all names and plot points are the Miltonic versions, here, so don't go arguing that Delilah/Dalila was really a harlot, etc., because I know) and there's this riddle about getting honey from a dead lion that he's not supposed to tell anyone, so he goes and challenges everyone to figure it out, and The Timnanatrix is all like, "Oh, come on, honey, you can tell me," so he does, and... well, the whole thing ends up with adultery and burning, let me put it that way. So then he goes and marries another Philistine woman, Dalila, even though he was told not to, and the Philistine men come to her and flash all this bling and offer to buy out, like, all of Harry Winston's for her, and so she's all like, "Samson, honey? What's your big weakness?" And he's all like, "Seven green withs that have never been dried," which is total bullshit, so you know he knows that telling her is a bad idea. He knows! And then the next day he wakes up, and he's like, "Baby, why am I tied up?" And Dalila's bustling around the house, like, making coffee and whistling like she totally can't hear him, and he's like, "Baby, are these green withs? Seven of them? That have never been dried?" And she's like, "OMG LOOK HERE COME THE PHILISTINES!" And the Philistines come and Samson's all like RAAAA! SAMSON SMASH! and now they ded. And that night, the big complaint of the day is... DALILA saying, "Honey, you totally fibbed! Why didn't you tell me the truth?" And I'm sorry, but "Baby, why am I tied up?" will ALWAYS trump "Why didn't you tell me the truth?" But Samson's like, "Awww, honey, I just wasn't sure I could trust you." NO, REALLY. And they do this for THREE DAYS ("Baby? These ropes? Are they new? Seven of them?") and EVERY DAY the Philistines just "happen" to bust in while he's tied up with the exact thing he told her about. And then! AND THEN! "It came to pass, when she pressed him daily with her words, and urged him, so that his soul was vexed unto death" ("YOU ARE SLEEPING UNTO THE COUCH, MISTER"), that he tells her the truth and they come and cut his hair off and blind him and put him in the workhouse. HE TELLS HER THE TRUTH. ARE YOU FOR REAL? WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT? I just... GAH. Anything that happened to that man, he had coming, I'm sorry.
I think I rocked the exam, though. She had promised it would be extremely easy--basically, take 75 minutes to write an essay on Samson Agonistes. If we didn't like any of the prompts, we could check with her and make one up. (I was really tempted to write the whole thing along the lines of "Baby, why I am tied up?" instead of my usual academic voice. That would have been so much fun.) The questions were things like, "Compare Eve and Dalila." The essay itself was still challenging--I chose the question about responding to the claim that John Carey made in 2002 that Samson Agonistes promotes terrorism (you know, when Samson pulls the temple down and kills everyone) and should no longer be taught (!), and I still had to compare it to Paradise Lost and all. So it was challenging to answer that coherently, but I basically argued that, while Samson's countrymen glorify what he did, the text itself views Samson's life and death as, essentially, a waste of great potential, and that anyone who actually reads the text would hardly want to emulate him. OH SNAP.
(Am officially done with class for the semester. The frantic book-writing begins NOW.)
Then Mom and I went out to Sol Azteca for lunch, since she'd taken half a day off to get errands done. We came home and packed up Vladimir's Christmas Package #1, and he told me to send it to Croatia via "plain U.S. mail," but Mom was like, "Oh, right, UPS." And I'm sitting here thinking, Mom, UPS is a completely different company, but whatever. So we get there, and they box it up for us and are very friendly and the younger guy who was actually doing the calculating for us was verreh, verreh cute, and so Mom asked him about how we would possibly ship Vladimir's Christmas Package #2, because it is a [thing], and... you know, [things] are hard to send through the mail these days. You know, terrorism and all that. It might get confiscated. And I'm sitting here about to sink into the floor, like, Oh, God, please don't ask about the [thing] now, for the love of sweet fancy Moses, and the older guy boxing up Package #1 is like, "A [THING]?" And I'm like, "Yeah, you know... a [thing]. An [adjective] [adjective] [thing]." And younger guy #2 is like, "A [THING]? Made by [PEOPLE]? We've shipped one of those before! Those are AWESOME." And then younger guy #1 was looking up Croatian customs regulations and things and turned the screen around to us, which should have been my first clue that this was going to be bad, and said, "Okay. It's going to be... FIVE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-EIGHT DOLLARS."
So after we choked down our bile of shock, we paid the nice UPS people for their superb packing job ($7.50) and fled. And then we had a mild argument about whether there really is a difference between UPS and the USPS. I'm pretty sure you can imagine how this went. So there at the post office, we mailed off a shitload of letters from Mom's office and bought Christmas stamps and... (drumroll)... got me a PO box! So if you ever need to send me anything (I'm talking, like, letters here, not "your firstborn children" or anything), address it to:
Cleolinda Jones
PO Box 59252
Homewood, AL 35209
Whee!
ETA: I totally forgot to finish the saga of the Christmas package. We got to USPS to send it air mail for $60. Not bad for a twenty-pound box.
Knitting: I found an awesome scarf pattern that's like, "Knit so many stitches to a row, and then knit rows until you're tired. The end." I will be using this one to start off with, once I get my needles and my yarn.
Still to do: the Lost recap. I haven't had dinner yet, but I think this one will be fun, so once I've made a sandwich or something I'm coming back up here to knock that out.
Fundraising: Please, please, please, if you have donated (and if this is a bad time for you, that is totally, totally okay--don't worry about it), please go log what you gave here, so I can add it up. No one will see the answers but me (and my mother, who has generously offered to calculate the tally for us so I can get on to writing the book and the recap, and she doesn't know any of y'all from Adam's housecat). What I had discussed doing with iczer6 is, once we have an updated tally, setting a goal above that, and we meet that goal, I'll post Lemony Snicket or Phantom of the Opera or something in Fifteen Minutes, which I normally might not do just because I won't have time this month (we'll have to see if I can do anything else not related to the book). I'm not saying that a "Fifteen Minutes" is all that thrilling a prize, but it's something within my power to offer, so... yeah. (Also, because it's straight parody, not fanfiction per se, I don't think we'll have any legal complications.) Let me know if that sounds all right with y'all, and if no one has any problems with that, I'll take it to m15m, which is a whole new pool of people, and we'll get started.
Rewind. I finished my paper about an hour before the exam, mostly because I just hit this point where the paper was still a couple of pages short, but... I'd said everything I wanted to say. You know? So I just called it a day.
I did get to the point where I start making up words. Like "paganinity."
Random thought: I hate "Proserpina" and vastly prefer "Persephone." Stupid Romans.
And I read all of Samson Agonistes! (...she says, in that slightly smug, very self-satisfied tone reserved for the accomplishment of things you were supposed to do anyway. Possibly two weeks ago, in fact.) By the way: Samson is an idiot. He marries the Woman of Timna(th) (all names and plot points are the Miltonic versions, here, so don't go arguing that Delilah/Dalila was really a harlot, etc., because I know) and there's this riddle about getting honey from a dead lion that he's not supposed to tell anyone, so he goes and challenges everyone to figure it out, and The Timnanatrix is all like, "Oh, come on, honey, you can tell me," so he does, and... well, the whole thing ends up with adultery and burning, let me put it that way. So then he goes and marries another Philistine woman, Dalila, even though he was told not to, and the Philistine men come to her and flash all this bling and offer to buy out, like, all of Harry Winston's for her, and so she's all like, "Samson, honey? What's your big weakness?" And he's all like, "Seven green withs that have never been dried," which is total bullshit, so you know he knows that telling her is a bad idea. He knows! And then the next day he wakes up, and he's like, "Baby, why am I tied up?" And Dalila's bustling around the house, like, making coffee and whistling like she totally can't hear him, and he's like, "Baby, are these green withs? Seven of them? That have never been dried?" And she's like, "OMG LOOK HERE COME THE PHILISTINES!" And the Philistines come and Samson's all like RAAAA! SAMSON SMASH! and now they ded. And that night, the big complaint of the day is... DALILA saying, "Honey, you totally fibbed! Why didn't you tell me the truth?" And I'm sorry, but "Baby, why am I tied up?" will ALWAYS trump "Why didn't you tell me the truth?" But Samson's like, "Awww, honey, I just wasn't sure I could trust you." NO, REALLY. And they do this for THREE DAYS ("Baby? These ropes? Are they new? Seven of them?") and EVERY DAY the Philistines just "happen" to bust in while he's tied up with the exact thing he told her about. And then! AND THEN! "It came to pass, when she pressed him daily with her words, and urged him, so that his soul was vexed unto death" ("YOU ARE SLEEPING UNTO THE COUCH, MISTER"), that he tells her the truth and they come and cut his hair off and blind him and put him in the workhouse. HE TELLS HER THE TRUTH. ARE YOU FOR REAL? WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT? I just... GAH. Anything that happened to that man, he had coming, I'm sorry.
I think I rocked the exam, though. She had promised it would be extremely easy--basically, take 75 minutes to write an essay on Samson Agonistes. If we didn't like any of the prompts, we could check with her and make one up. (I was really tempted to write the whole thing along the lines of "Baby, why I am tied up?" instead of my usual academic voice. That would have been so much fun.) The questions were things like, "Compare Eve and Dalila." The essay itself was still challenging--I chose the question about responding to the claim that John Carey made in 2002 that Samson Agonistes promotes terrorism (you know, when Samson pulls the temple down and kills everyone) and should no longer be taught (!), and I still had to compare it to Paradise Lost and all. So it was challenging to answer that coherently, but I basically argued that, while Samson's countrymen glorify what he did, the text itself views Samson's life and death as, essentially, a waste of great potential, and that anyone who actually reads the text would hardly want to emulate him. OH SNAP.
(Am officially done with class for the semester. The frantic book-writing begins NOW.)
Then Mom and I went out to Sol Azteca for lunch, since she'd taken half a day off to get errands done. We came home and packed up Vladimir's Christmas Package #1, and he told me to send it to Croatia via "plain U.S. mail," but Mom was like, "Oh, right, UPS." And I'm sitting here thinking, Mom, UPS is a completely different company, but whatever. So we get there, and they box it up for us and are very friendly and the younger guy who was actually doing the calculating for us was verreh, verreh cute, and so Mom asked him about how we would possibly ship Vladimir's Christmas Package #2, because it is a [thing], and... you know, [things] are hard to send through the mail these days. You know, terrorism and all that. It might get confiscated. And I'm sitting here about to sink into the floor, like, Oh, God, please don't ask about the [thing] now, for the love of sweet fancy Moses, and the older guy boxing up Package #1 is like, "A [THING]?" And I'm like, "Yeah, you know... a [thing]. An [adjective] [adjective] [thing]." And younger guy #2 is like, "A [THING]? Made by [PEOPLE]? We've shipped one of those before! Those are AWESOME." And then younger guy #1 was looking up Croatian customs regulations and things and turned the screen around to us, which should have been my first clue that this was going to be bad, and said, "Okay. It's going to be... FIVE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-EIGHT DOLLARS."
So after we choked down our bile of shock, we paid the nice UPS people for their superb packing job ($7.50) and fled. And then we had a mild argument about whether there really is a difference between UPS and the USPS. I'm pretty sure you can imagine how this went. So there at the post office, we mailed off a shitload of letters from Mom's office and bought Christmas stamps and... (drumroll)... got me a PO box! So if you ever need to send me anything (I'm talking, like, letters here, not "your firstborn children" or anything), address it to:
Cleolinda Jones
PO Box 59252
Homewood, AL 35209
Whee!
ETA: I totally forgot to finish the saga of the Christmas package. We got to USPS to send it air mail for $60. Not bad for a twenty-pound box.
Knitting: I found an awesome scarf pattern that's like, "Knit so many stitches to a row, and then knit rows until you're tired. The end." I will be using this one to start off with, once I get my needles and my yarn.
Still to do: the Lost recap. I haven't had dinner yet, but I think this one will be fun, so once I've made a sandwich or something I'm coming back up here to knock that out.
Fundraising: Please, please, please, if you have donated (and if this is a bad time for you, that is totally, totally okay--don't worry about it), please go log what you gave here, so I can add it up. No one will see the answers but me (and my mother, who has generously offered to calculate the tally for us so I can get on to writing the book and the recap, and she doesn't know any of y'all from Adam's housecat). What I had discussed doing with iczer6 is, once we have an updated tally, setting a goal above that, and we meet that goal, I'll post Lemony Snicket or Phantom of the Opera or something in Fifteen Minutes, which I normally might not do just because I won't have time this month (we'll have to see if I can do anything else not related to the book). I'm not saying that a "Fifteen Minutes" is all that thrilling a prize, but it's something within my power to offer, so... yeah. (Also, because it's straight parody, not fanfiction per se, I don't think we'll have any legal complications.) Let me know if that sounds all right with y'all, and if no one has any problems with that, I'll take it to m15m, which is a whole new pool of people, and we'll get started.