Operation: Life Skillz

So this is creepy, but I realized that I'm more self-disciplined when I classify mundane things as tactical battles. I started calling my attempt to regain a six pack Operation: Stop Getting Fat, and I totally started going to the gym again and put a self-imposed ban on buying cereal, which I tend to eat fistfuls of all day long with no self-control whatsoever. (I suffered a strategic loss when I went to a picnic on Wednesday and Chase pointed out that we had suddenly become the Girls at the Dessert Table. Still, it's going pretty well.)

Anyway, I'm toying with the idea of Operation: Fiscal Discipline and Operation: Rule the (Exam) School as I try to make it through the rest of June with a) a positive balance in my bank account and b) a halfway decent score on my last exam at Oxford. As a result, I've been doing odd jobs and making flash cards like nobody's business for the past two days. I'm as uneasy as you are that I can only succeed at life when I frame it in blatantly militaristic terms, but there you go. When I start using euphemisms for things like Operation: Glorious Success, I'm going to enter counseling.

In That Nobody Knocked Out All My Teeth

I woke up this morning with a tiny chip in the corner of my front tooth, which somehow apparently happened in my sleep. What am I supposed to do now? Do I have dental insurance in the UK? Can this maybe wait until I get back to the US so that I can entrust it to Connie, my dental hygienist since age 5? Should I stop opening bottles with my mouth?

Luckily, the day went uphill from there.

Killer Bees are Coming

One of the nice parts about cohabitating in two separate apartments is that when you turn on the light to find that one is filled with literally thousands of gnats, you've got someplace else to go. I suddenly understand why it took seven plagues to get a polygamous population out of Egypt.

Take It Away, Freud

I think it's a sign to stop working when you reread the latest part of your study guide and catch yourself referring to the structural-functionalism of Radcliffe-Frown.

OMGG

I'm giving a paper on class, sexuality, and transgression in Gossip Girl tomorrow, and I was just planning on giving the version I presented at the Oxford Radical Forum until a friend of mine who's watched every episode multiple times mentioned that she's planning to come and has tons of questions. And I suddenly realized that this paper probably sounds good to academics who have never watched the show or devotees who don't regularly think of pop culture in Gramscian terms, but not to the tiny but terrifying group of people who are at the middle of that Venn diagram. And now it is midnight, and I'm pounding tea and trying to trick Slideshow into letting me do impossible things.

The worst part was that I poured myself a cup of coffee, pulled up the paper, and sat down to do this at about 4pm this afternoon, and then David called and this happened:

"Hey, what are you up to?"
"I just sat down at my desk."
"You should probably take a break."
"I can't. What's up?"
"They just set up a Moon Bounce across the street."
"Don't move, I'm on my way."

Now I'm sunburned and totally screwed and I have some kind of weird anti-gravity rickets.

My Fair Lady

You know how sometimes, you watch a movie for a second time and you notice things that you totally missed the first time? That happened with Free Willy, which 10 year old Ryan thought was a pretty good movie about whales and 23 year old Ryan thought was a profound morality tale about capitalism, environmentalism, and the foster system. Yesterday, it happened again with My Fair Lady, which turns out to be way more ideologically charged than I remember it being when I watched it in eighth grade in Ms. Del Val's music class. If you haven't already, go watch it, spend ten years developing a basic familiarity with Marxist and feminist thought, move to the UK for two years, and then watch it again. It is profound.

(It probably doesn't help that I'm out of TV shows and have been watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 reruns pretty much non-stop all week, so it took every ounce of self-restraint I had to keep the running commentary in my head instead of muttering at the screen. One person couldn't, and blurted out that this reminded them of their Rhodes interview.)



(I appreciated it so much that I almost high-fived them.)

With a Special Cameo of the Late Bea Arthur as Sandra Day O'Connor

The Daily Beast just did a mock casting for a movie about Sotomayor, and it pretty much defines the phrase horrifantastic.