Holy Crap.

This is from the comments section of an Awl post about Harry Potter (the discussion started ranging from His Dark Materials and the Chronicles of Narnia to Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, predictably).

I mean, it's also possible to see Star Wars as the story of a group of malcontent guerrillas willing to murder thousands of government-contracted workers and disrupt an entire galactic economy simply for the opportunity to impose their own imperfect authority on a majority population of billions that was more or less OK with the status quo (and to reinstate the members of an elite religious order as a paramilitary arm of the state!).

OH MY GOD THE JEDI WERE EVIL

Do you like your old asshole?

BECAUSE YOU'RE ABOUT TO GET A NEW ONE (courtesy of the online survey I'm taking about a professor I suffered through this semester):

The professor was frequently unprepared to answer student questions (she often gave the answer "that's not my specialty, so I don't know how to answer that" if the question was regarding anything other than [her specialty]), gave unclear answers to student questions about class/project requirements (she frequently made it clear that she was speculating if it wasn't stated outright in the text itself - in fact, she taught almost exclusively out of the text, and, when asked for clarification not present in the text, was often unable to give it), and used materials not available to all students to create exam questions. I came into this class very eager to learn more about abnormal psychology - by all reports (when I asked other students or teachers) this should have been a fun and engaging class, easy to study for, but it was not. I have found, upon thinking more about why they had much better experiences with this course than I did, that the one factor that was different was the professor. Basically: I should have just dropped the course and reenrolled for the Spring semester when I found out the usual (tenured) professor wasn't teaching, but I gave this (adjunct) professor a chance and it backfired.

In short: Fuck me? FUCK YOU.

All Het Up

In response to this post at The Hairpin, wherein the male author pleads,

"The compulsion to look at cleavage is a constant struggle,** as the rewards offered by a stolen glimpse of upper-to-mid-boob are far outweighed by the risk of being viewed as a creep. But controlling the urge is a thankless job; in the history of gender relations, I doubt any woman has ever expressed gratitude for the restraint a dude showed in not copping an ocular feel. And that’s fine! We don’t expect to be thanked just for not being jerks. But how about maybe just quietly giving us a smidge of credit? We’re not monsters and we’re not homunculuses*** blindly flailing our sweaty, disgusting eyes toward any partially exposed breast that comes into view. Don’t we deserve the courtesy of not being under constant suspicion?"

I must reply, No, men do not deserve that courtesy, because it is not a courtesy. A courtesy, for the sake of defining terms and avoiding a devolution into semantic arguments, is "consideration, cooperation, and generosity in providing something". Thus, the courtesy for which the author asks is not a courtesy any more than you not eye-molesting me is a courtesy.

Unless the author thinks that his NOT eye-molesting people is a courtesy, at which point he has very helpfully identified himself as a misogynist who believes that women deserve whatever treatment they are handed by the powerful males in the world and the author's resisting the rights duly afforded to him by Having a Penis is a generous act. The simplest way I can think to put it is that this person seems to think that my not slapping everyone who bugs me across their fleshy, slobbering faces is something to be praised. I mean, that's very nice of him, but I fully recognize that my ability to manage life in a completely non-violent fashion is not an accomplishment. It's just WHAT'S EXPECTED OF ADULTS, and rightfully so.

Okay. I am hereby putting myself in Time Out, reason: Ranting at a Converted Audience, but let me just say - before I do - that this article having been thought out, written, and published by a man who is by all other measures someone I'd admire makes me feel nothing short of suddenly, very alone, to a degree that it may only be described as crestfallen.

SHUT UP, iTUNES, JUST SHUT UP

*mimes sarcastic masturbation*

Girl, I been there.

I don't know what else to say about this.

Don't get me started

The title of this post is in reference to NaNoWriMo.

In other news, I got THIS spam letter today, from Jason Holley. The subject was: "lng mv9", and the body of the email, in its entirety, read "0qg"

So now it seems kind of pointless, but when I read it I collapsed with laughter. I guess I'm just ready for this week to be over already. Ugh.

New Phone, New Goals

I got a new phone, you guys! And I like it.

That's right, I just like it so far. It's weird, I mimed masturbation pretty much every time the ad for the new phone came on so I was pretty sure I was going to be beyond psyched (it's the Blackberry Torch, by the way) but when I turned my trusty old 8820 off for the last time just now I actually felt really sad. Like, really sad. The 8820 and I have been through some big life events together...but it finally came time to change when the poor thing kept freezing and shutting down under the stress of having to run two applications at once. And I'm DONE replacing trackballs, thank god.

But still, I have to admit that some of these mixed emotions stem from the fact that there's a little part of me that is scared of the Torch - today the salesman was advising me to switch to Wi-Fi when I wanted to use "YouTube, Pandora, any kind of streaming video or music download really" and I was like...you can do that on phones now? I was just happy to have a camera finally. Speaking of which, Imma TwitPic the SHIT out of all you people later. After I figure out how to take pictures.

In other news, it's the second day and already the prospect of NaNoWriMo lasting a full month is stressing me out. I mean, 1667 words a day (if you want to be technical about it) is a lot by anyone's standards, and this is all in addition to the papers I have to write for school still...don't get me wrong, I really want to do this, for many reasons. I think I will just have to satisfy myself with at least writing SOMETHING every day and doing my best to catch up on weekends: even if I don't end up with my full 50,000 words, I'll still have accomplished something major (the beginning of a NOVEL, a real PROJECT, to some degree of completion) without losing quality of life completely.

And tomorrow is Wednesday, taking us one day closer to the weekend and the sweet release of sleeping for 20 hours in a row (the mere action of thinking about NaNoWriMo just did that - it took me from jazzed about accomplishing goals to anticipating my brain's shut-off limit in about 12 minutes). Hey! Look! It's nighttime...I'm gonna go do that now.