Dance with disaster without missing a step

I laugh in the face of certain doom! Well, semi-certain. Everything might be fine. Actually, I’m just exaggerating for dramatic effect. I’m pretty much just snickering behind the back of minor annoyance! All this to say, I don’t think I’ll fail any classes this semester as a result of the Feast, which is good! I have almost all the work/reading done that I wanted to finish before we left, and all teachers are being most reasonable.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Deerhoof lately, which is kind of like listening to a very young child sing random silly songs while banging on a pot from the kitchen. For a while it’s very adorable, and then it gets a little old, and then you don’t want to hear it ever again. Which is how I feel about most indie noise pop, but once in a while you hit gold and it makes it worth it. I just love the titles, even if the songs are dumb. Examples: “No One Fed Me So I Stayed”, “Spirit Ditties of No Tone”, etc.

I finished Frankenstein, which was an adventure in gothic emotionalism! Or something. It wasn’t that fantastic. I’m working on Dracula by Bram Stoker now (for my Literary Gothic class, also known as The Magnificent Class), which is better than I had remembered. I read it a few years ago, and as I was reading it I suddenly felt like I had read it before and remembered what was going to happen to Lucy. This was quite strange, and for the memory to be so foggy I must’ve read it when I was very young. But I don’t actually remember reading it then. I kind of like book deja vu sometimes, it’s always interesting and usually bizarre.

I have already consumed large quantities of cheerios and apples this weekend, and I predict it will be brilliant. I’m looking forward very much to the Feast of Tabernacles; I’m definitely ready to go. Atonement is, of course, Monday so I’ll be at home until after sunset Monday, which means I’ll only be at school for Tuesday and Wednesday before we’re off to Wisconsin on Thursday. It’ll be a quieter trip than last year, but that’s good; we all could use some R & R time.

So many ideas I could write about! Or do art about! But no time. Also I believe the ‘creative’ mood theme has been tagged, by far, the most often.

I don’t really have anything to say, I just felt like typing. That’s the great thing about a blog. You don’t actually say anything, but your fingers get a workout. Oh, actually, wait, I did have something to say. I finished Godel, Escher, Bach a long time ago and forgot to tell you! You can get off the edge of your seat now. I technically skimmed some (read: a good bit of) it because of the exceeding mathness. I felt somewhat jipped in that it was more math than art or music, but that’s ok.

Right now I’m reading Frankenstein. For crying out loud, pull yourself together, Dr. F! No one made you sew corpses together to make a hideous monstrosity with impeccable grammar. You did it to yourself, Dr. F. No sympathy from me, none at all.

For The Literary Gothic, also known as the most incredible class ever, we read a bunch of neat stuff. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and The Turn of the Screw. First two I had read, the third I had not. Apparently I am pretty much completely oblivious to any Victorian-style insinuations, because we got to the discussion of the book and I was somewhat scandalized. EXTREMELY interesting class, however; I have never had so much fun in a class, and I generally have a good bit of fun in my classes.

Hmm, might be time for new icons. Funny how I always update on the weekends. Presumably because I don’t have 10 spare seconds during the week. I do adore school though; it is so wonderous! Also, refulgent is my new favorite word. There is a guy who sits behind me in religion who loves words! We traded words of more than 4 syllables back and forth the other day, ’twas grand. Anyway, refulgent means shining brightly, radiant. Isn’t that beautiful??

I have a confession to make. I have purchased something like 20 used books online. ThriftBooks.Com is my new favorite place on the internet. Most books are 1 cent (!), plus $2.50 shipping or so. They don’t have everything (what, no Hornblower?), but it’s sublime anyway. I don’t really feel guilty about buying so much. Technically it’ll all be second tithe, and I plan on reading horrendous amounts on the plane. Speaking of which, the Feast of Tabernacles snuck up on me. We leave a week from this Thursday. Which means I have to really get cracking on my schoolwork to get ahead before I depart. I’m writing this extremely fun paper on James Fenimore Cooper and Mark Twain, which needs to be FINISHED. It’s fun, but…still a paper. Does anyone else even read Cooper for fun? I loved his books…I should get those sometime. I’ve noticed I had a much higher tolerance for ponderous or “difficult” reading when I was younger. Hawkeye’s long soliloquies didn’t faze me a bit when I first read them, but I had some trouble getting through them a year or two when I reread the books. Same deal with a lot of the other classics; how did I get through them when I was younger? Now I have to be all “FOCUS, Ricker!” and I never used to have to do that. Good heavens. I hope that doesn’t mean by the time I’m 80 all I’ll be able to read are Tom Clancy novels. *shudder*

These are pretty much the coolest things ever, but I just can’t justify buying one. Maybe if they could double as armor, sure. Hmm. Ok, well I’m done.

I am sitting here sipping some black cherry raspberry something-or-other tea with some honey and lemon juice mixed in, listening to The Decemberists, and looking at this truly awesome dogblog. Really, it almost makes up for being sick. ….Almost.

Why is it that tea always smells at least slightly better than it tastes? This is a universal constant, insofar as I can tell.

Gracie has this thing where she sprawls all over the bottom wheels of my spinny computer chair, and I can’t get up without running her ears over. Why is that? Surely she knows this will only end in tears.

Hmm. I definitely have a fever. Should I do something about it? No. Although, sleep might not be a bad thing. Don’t you just hate it when you’re tired, but you’re cold-tired, meaning you can’t actually sleep because your head is clogged with mucus? I hate that. However, it’s great for reading!

I had lots of great things to talk about, I know I did.

Oh, one of them was about Beowulf. We go on walks very often, as you know if you know me at all, and he has recently taken to following us. The only difficulty is that his legs are much much shorter than everyone else’s, including Gracie’s. So he bounds ahead valiantly for a while, then bounds less exuberantly, then trots, then finally plods along. Then he starts crying, extremely pitifully, until someone carries him the rest of the way home. It’s quite adorable. When Ed was very small one of his first words was “Up!” because of the exact same reason! And thus cats are human, QED.

Not really.

My first word wasn’t Mama or Dada either, it was “eye”. Rickers aren’t normal, really. I was 13 months old, and Mom was reading an alphabet book, and she got to the letter I, and I pointed to my eye and said “eye!”. I don’t actually recall this, but Mom likes to tell the story. I love alphabet stories. When Ed was just born (so I wasn’t quite 2 and a half), Mom had had a very bad morning and was a bit frazzled. I walked in with Pat the Bunny, one of my favorite books (this I do remember! My beloved Pat the Bunny). I sat down and spelled out “P-A-T. T-H-E. B-U-N-N-Y,” with my finger on the cover. As Mom tells it, she was so flabbergasted she didn’t believe I did it and asked, “What did you say??” I dearly loved my little books. I remember every night putting them on their little shelf very carefully with the rest of my toys. Sigh…good times. I’m in a reminiscing mood because Mom just got out a lot of stuff from the cedar chest the other day. It’s so strange because I remember wearing those tiny clothes but I don’t remember them being tiny. I love being a kid.

*sips her tea and sniffles*

You think you know what’s to come, who you are; you haven’t even begun.

Hello, world! The word of the week is sesquipedalian, which means “given to the use of long words”. Carve it on my tombstone.

This guy took a picture of himself every day for 6 years, and set them to music. That’s dedication.

There have been many grand adventures at school lately! Involving climbing many things, running down trails in the woods under a full moon, and other such grandness. I highly recommend it!

Oh my, I also saw Serenity with Faith and Sarah and…*brain ‘splode* Very, very good. Oh, how I love Firefly; why were you cancelled, why why?? I dearly hope there will be as second movie one day.

There is a multi-legged creature crawling on your shoulder.

Greetings, fellow bloggers! Poor neglected creatures that you are.

School is well underway, hence my lack of online presence, lack of book posts, etc. College is just so great. Crazy-mad-cool! I love my classes, my professors, my friends, my roommate, and even my dorm room! Which reminds me, what would you name a philodendron? It’s been weighing on my mind.

There is talk of getting a group together to do an independent study of Old English! My joy knows no bounds.

Bookwise, I checked Godel, Escher, Bach out from the college library, and have been slogging my way through it. If I ignore most of the math stuff and just enjoy the paradoxical goodness of the rest of it, I’m fine. Otherwise, I get completely bogged down in the mathyness and it just gets ugly.

Oh my, I have found the coolest word EVER. I was reading something (I think it was the poems of Edward Taylor) and I came across the word smaragdine. There was a footnote that mentioned that this meant ’emerald green’. I just now googled it, and it’s true! That’s so beautiful. And then I found THIS. And that’s even cooler! I will have magnificent words for a year at least! I think when people ask me what my favorite color is, I should say zinnober. Except they would probably throw things at me.