Apparently this year’s Holiday Card Exchange has been fraught with mishaps and elvish mischief, because a lot of people are reporting that they haven’t received the preliminary list that went out over the weekend, and when I check the list, I never received their email asking to sign up. So if you sent me something and haven’t heard from me yet, please check in on the comments with your email address (only I can see it) and I will send you an email that you can reply to, which will hopefull evade Gmail’s overprotective spam filter.
Also, in other Holiday related stuff, I have signed up for Holidailies in effort to get back into the swing of posting/writing regularly. Yes, I know, December is crizazy, with struggling to finish my work project by New Year’s Eve (when my budget turns into a pumpkin, spent or not), finals, general domestic craziness and doing the prep work for the Minicon (although really, most of that is done and the rest can’t be done until January and also, already 24 of the hottest people on the planet have signed up, leaving a mere 10 spots remaining) but as my new writing mentor, Dr. O. Henry, says: “you must make time for writing. The laundry will get done, the bills paid, the baby fed, regardless of whether you spend an hour a day writing or not, so put writing first, otherwise you’ll never get to it.” So expect many bursts of short but sweet entries throughout December, rather than my normal 2500 word essays and treatises. Ok, I’m giving myself way too much credit, but still. Holidailies! Yay!
This weekend, I took the advice of my freelance editor and actually did pretty much nothing all weekend. I spent a lot of it watching a marathon of Anne of Green Gables and it occurred to me that when I met Esteban, he looked a hell of a lot like Gilbert Blythe, so much so that watching the marathon, I was getting a little freaked out by the resemblance. How have I never noticed this before? Also, I’m struck by how truly awful an actor Megan Follows and Schuyler Grant are. I had only seen the non-LM Montgomery sequel to the sequel, the one where suddenly Anne is traipsing through WWI with someone else’s baby, searching for Gilbert, smuggling diamonds and also possibly a spy, to which I can give a hearty WTF because it is so very abyssmal that I think Kevin Sullivan might just have been smoking crack. Also, wow, Megan must have taken up smoking in the years between projects because her voice had dropped at least an octave. Although, really, my own voice is very low and I don’t touch cigarettes, so I shouldn’t be so judgey.
Fuck it, I enjoy the judgey.
Speaking of judging, today, I am enrolling in classes for what is my final semester as a Master’s student. Which means that next semester, I have to sit in a room and have my academic progress judged by three professors who will decide whether or not I can a) receive my Master’s Degree and b) continue on for the PhD. I haven’t decided whether or not I will go for that, but will still aim for it, since it would be nice to have the option. Right now, after last semester, I am heartily sick of academia and as Betty points out, I really can’t see myself teaching in a university setting. I have been ruined by the real world at this point and get frustrated by those sheltered from it. Also, the paychecks are wee and I enjoy shiny pretty things too much.
If you listen to the Podcast (and really, you should be because my fellow casters of the pod are hilarious and also, very fucking sexy) on Embarrassment, you heard me tell a story about paying someone $5 at class for a silly reason and then sitting through the entire class, just waiting for the anecdote to get blabbed to everyone. But it didn’t, and I was so very relieved. I shouldn’t have relaxed, because not TWO MINUTES into the very next class, one of the parties who got mildly inconvenienced in the $5 incident blurted it out to the world and I believe not only was there a raised voice, but also finger pointing. I stood proud, refusing to be ashamed for what some might call bribery, but what I consider simply following through on saying something stupid so that those witnessing the exchange wouldn’t think that my mouth wrote checks that my ass couldn’t cash (my ass can’t cash a lot of checks, mind you, but $5 checks don’t even require a second form of identification) and now it has become the new classroom joke. Don’t want to do something? I’ll pay you $5. Don’t like my story? What if I pay you $5? My writing workshop has turned into a strip club, requiring wads of bills in small denominations. And all of my cache I had built up for being wry and clever and the cool girl? Gone. Presuming that there was any cache in the first place. I am woefully lacking in cache.
This is why I am shy around new people, right here. Because I don’t want them to know how stupid I am right off the bat. I’d rather allow my stupidity to unfold slowly, like the petals of a flower.
A big old stupid flower.
