V is for Victory, and Very Tired

I finished typing at the stroke of midnight. And you can tell that I'm really working hard because a) I'm progressively getting nakeder, which happens when I'm furiously writing into the night and b) I've suddenly got very strong Marxist opinions and a decidedly postmodernist vocabulary, which also happens in those circumstances. And that's why I'm in a muscle shirt and underpants, and why I'm fervently arguing that capitalism is witchcraft.

Shell of a Person

I've been reduced to rewarding myself with a cup of Sainsbury's instant coffee if I finish transcribing excerpts from Michael Taussig's The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America by midnight. I'm all about carrots and sticks, but instant coffee is a pretty depressing carrot.

You know what the sad part is? I'm totally not going to make that deadline.

Sometimes, I Set Unreasonable Goals for Myself

After accidentally telling my supervisor that I was jetting off to Morocco on Sunday just shy of the beginning of our vacation, I've tried not to bring it up again. Sometimes, this involves a little bit of strategic vagueness, like when he asked if I could stop by his office on Wednesday and I told him that Wednesday wasn't so great, but Friday would work. I strategically didn't say "Wednesday isn't so great, because I'll still be drinking mint tea. IN NORTH AFRICA!" (I know it doesn't seem like much, but that really is about the maximum amount of tact I possess.)

But this also meant that when we decided to change our tutorial topic for 8th Week, I just casually asked if I could get the reading list to get started on the reading without really saying why. And maybe because I never gave a particularly good reason, we got the list this morning. Of course, it's the longest we've ever gotten - with a whopping fourteen articles or chapters and SEVEN ENTIRE BOOKS - that I'm supposed to have read in the next twenty-four hours so that I can spend Saturday writing an essay, proofreading it, and sending it before I jet off at dawn on Sunday. I savagely gutted my social calendar, but I've still got a charity auction and a drink with a friend from out of town that I can't miss. And I can usually skip a reading or two and nobody dies, but I could skip half of them and it would still be insane. So basically, this is going to be the ultimate test of my ability to recover from very poorly executed decisions.

(I say that now, but we all know I'll make worse decisions in the next couple weeks or so, so let's not kid ourselves. I'm not going to stress about this too much.)

In Which I Sleep Through an Earthquake

I've been told that there was an earthquake yesterday at about one o'clock in the morning, which was approximately fifteen minutes after I crawled into bed post-bartending and fell asleep. And somehow, even though Erika and Jessica could feel their beds shaking as the building trembled, I just slumbered right through it. It's not like this is new. Once, I woke up and pulled my knees up to my chest and told Lee that it kept me from falling back asleep, and then promptly fell asleep on my back in a sort of stylized fetal position. Still, sleeping through an earthquake is certainly a new twist. I could try a hat trick with a fire alarm and a riot and see if I'm completely disaster-proof, but I might wait on that for a while.

BBC South Today (and Yesterday and Tomorrow)

Every afternoon during lunch, the BBC's South Today reliably reports on at least one of four topics:

1) the Princess Diana inquest
2) a missing child
3) the obesity epidemic
4) binge-drinking in Britain

And when they hit two, my lunch ends. It's a foolproof way to keep myself from sitting in the tearoom all day and watching game shows.

In a jarring change of pace, they had a special feature on hospice care today with Hugh Grant. Technically, Hugh Grant earnestly talked about death and dignity in the background while the BBC kept replacing him with black and white glamour shots of himself, but the important thing is that it was in no way related to Madeleine McCann. It was a bold move, and I applaud it.

Take Your Mama Out

Of all of the much-needed vacations that I have coming up over the break, I'm most looking forward to the Thursday in April when I'm taking my mom to Embassy to go clubbing for the night. Back in the day, Brady and I took her to the I-Beam in Fargo and were trying to explain the differences to her between that bar (largely empty, lots of neon, clouds of cigarette smoke, Toby Keith, a popcorn machine) and places like Embassy where we went in Boston (packed shoulder to shoulder, go-go dancers, drinks we can't afford to consume in threes and fours, hip-hop, a distinct lack of popcorn), and we basically just concluded that they were in no way alike. So I promised to take her to Embassy, and now I'm supposed to deliver. And both of us are way more excited than we should be.

Toxic Chatter

So yesterday night was the Toxic Chatter party, celebrating the one year anniversary of a gossip podcast on iTunes co-hosted by a couple of friends of mine. It was extra-fun because it was also another friend's birthday, also at BabyLove, so it coincidentally happened that all of my favorite people from my fellowship program and all of my favorite people from my college were there mingling. (Everyone actually mixed like oil and water, but they were good sports when I awkwardly bounced from conversation to conversation.)

Anyway, the theme of the party was to dress as your favorite celebrity (natch), and as an avid reader of the Superficial, TMZ, Perez Hilton, and Pink is the New Blog, I started to panic when I realized that I couldn't think of anybody to go as. (I thought about Matthew McConaughey, but I had already shaved and I didn't have time to devolve.) Instead, I just sewed price tags onto all of my clothes and stuffed costume jewelry into my pockets and went as Winona Ryder.



It certainly wasn't the best costume (who can compete with Mariah, who?), but someone thought highly enough of it that I won a copy of Andrew Morton's The Beckhams, which is totally going to be my celebratory end-of-term reading on the flight to Israel. (Julie Burchill describes it on the cover as "a truly delightful and calorie-free indulgence." Watch yourself, VanGennep.) Anyway, I took a picture when I got home to digitally immortalize the evening. I think I was going for feigned innocence.