Edit: I'm going to have this as a sticky post so I can edit it as I read books. Maybe this way I won't forget about it, and will prevent myself from reading garbage constantly. Titles in purple are books I've read for Day Zero Project. --September 29, 2009

This is long, and I'm by no means requiring any of you to go through and read all of this. But I do want to have the list of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die assembled somewhere I can manipulate it. So this is the list, with the books I've read in the past struck through (is that remotely correct grammar?), and the ones I want to read for Day Zero in bold.

( 1001 Books... )

The Tea Sweeteners is an original novel about the lives and dramas of the residents of Wrightchurch Manor, a mysterious boardinghouse in Victorian England. I'm writing it as part of runaway_tales, and will post chapters there at least biweekly.

Eventually I'll draw up character descriptions and post them here under a cut. Until then...

Index
Author's Foreword
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4

Christmas knitting officially begins!

So I've been sort of obsessed with Christmas lately. It's gotten to the point that, sometime I think last week, I was stalking around the Christmas section of Wal-Mart with a terrified Dave, saying things like, "I'm sick of disappointing holidays. This Christmas is going to be the best Christmas ever because I'm going to make it that way, so just you get ready!" and "If anyone doesn't have a happy Christmas, I'll shoot them!"

I've already decided on my Christmas colour scheme, bought gift tags and a cookie recipe booklet and holiday cookie cutters. I've not bought my Christmas cards only because I'm torn about what design to buy. I've decided on gift boxes and cookie tins. I even have a tacky sweater to wear when I distribute gifts.

In the interest of forcefully implementing the best Christmas ever, I've also decided to make all of the presents I give. What better way to justify buying yarn and spending time knitting than giving everyone knitted presents for Christmas? And because I wouldn't be a properly obsessed knitter without a knitblog, I'm officially converting this journal to just that for the time leading up to Christmas. At least weekly, I'll post progress on my projects, including links to the patterns and yarn information, photographs, and stories about the gifts' recipients.

Until everyone has opened his or her presents, these entries will be locked (some more so than others). Then I'll make them public, so everyone can be jealous of my friends.

Gah, I hate the world and I want to get married!

Dress!

Dress!!

This has been your highly productive, mature, and feminist thought for the day.

Also, I don't like Henry James. I should, but I don't. There you have it.

I have a ton of homework that I neglected while I was in Memphis, which I desperately need to finish for tomorrow, but first I wanted to tell everyone that I had a great weekend. Kate, Dave, and I went to the Gandhi King Conference, where Kate and I presented four original poems as part of a session led by professors from UT Martin. The poems actually made people cry, and they sparked some really great discussions about the level of violence in our culture, making peace in times of war, the way the military has influenced people to become peace advocates, and other issues. The overall response was really positive, and we felt like poetry rock stars all weekend.

...And I felt like even more of a poetry rock star when I checked my email to find an acceptance of two poems from Midwest Literary Magazine! I sent in three, and the editors have decided to publish "Howard, Eating Jean-Paul and Simone" and "Fat Girls in Skinny Jeans" in their next issue! Both of these are pieces I wrote this semester as part of my senior project, and having them published is adds a great deal of validity to my project (which I sort of expect to be misunderstood, and which I know I'll have to defend impeccably in order to pass). And it's also a first step in the process of creating a name for myself. Definitely a success.

This post is brought to you mainly because I'm sitting in a computer lab, having just printed Psych of Women homework, and don't want to move quite yet. I know I'll be shoving off to my apartment soon, since I don't like walking around alone at night anymore, but for now I'm here.

That rapist thing really has me out of sorts, even though they arrested the guy and everything. I've never been stupid about getting into bad situations, but I used to be confident about moving around in the world. I kept my car key clenched in my fist, secure in the knowledge that if someone accosted me, I'd promptly rob him of his manhood and his eyes, then call the cops. Now I can't even make myself go to my car in the far parking lot at night without my boyfriend or having my mom on the phone. It makes me angry. Just in general, rape makes me angrier than anything else. The other week in class, a guy claimed that the reason rape convictions are so hard to get is that "women lie so much," accusing innocent men of rape, and I saw red and wanted to throttle him a bit. Yeah, it's because women lie. Not because they're too humiliated and scared of the justice system, or that they're intimidated by their attackers' lawyers, or any of the other things that convince women to drop the case. That's not why rape convictions are tricky. It's because rape victims are liars. Right.

But we had quiche and cream of cauliflower soup in the cafeteria tonight, and I have time to take a bubble bath and read. So, you know, you take what you can get.

P. S. My grades this semester are insane. I'm not bragging, but seriously, I've made only A's, and two of my test grades have been higher than 100. I would feel great about it if it weren't for the fact that the standard on this campus seems to be so low, judging from most of the people I see and hear in my classes. I'm smart as fuck, I know, but I'm always concerned that my grades owe at least a bit to inflation. Or maybe it's just that I'm sick of being in classes where the professor expects only 3-5 page essays. My first reaction to that is always, "LOL WUT?!" As a freshman, I responded to this obstacle by turning in 11 pages and making an A. Now I turn in 5 and feel rotten.

I've had another one of those few weeks where the only thing I can remember reading for fun is a couple of Edward Gorey-illustrated children's books. And not that I don't consider Edward Lear poetry not real literature, but Christ, if I don't read something for grown-ups I think I'll go bonkers.

So. I need Fall Break. I've got plans to drive home, which I'm looking forward to, since it's properly Fall now, and it's lovely, even if not all the leaves have turned yet.

Once at home, I will read lots, and probably work on my Advanced Grammar research paper about the American and English accents, but mainly reading. I might knit a little. I will geocache a lot. And I plan to make soup a lot, and I'm bringing my vegan cookbook home with me to avoid eating mainly grilled cheeses. And I might sew up a bunch of cloth menstrual pads, depending on what sort of flannel I find and what mood I'm in (read: lazy or not).

On a less idealized note, I really should start getting out of bed earlier in the morning. I don't have my first class on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday until 10 a.m., and I've slipped into the habit of ignoring my alarms until 8. This still leaves me time to loll about a little and manage, most days, to get breakfast in the cafeteria, but I wish I had more time. I think I would be more productive if I had an extra hour or so per day. And if I knocked out a revision, a process memo, an inkshed, and about half of my study questions, along with preliminary research, last night, then what might I do with an extra hour?

I'm sorry, but I think it's rude for the students who are my own age who work for Housing to tell me to clean my room when they do room checks, especially when the clutter in my room is comprised of things like skeins of yarn and notebooks, not of anything unsanitary. Show me a college student without a pile of clothes on his or her floor. Also, the last time I checked, female students' rooms were not supposed to be checked by male workers without a female worker watching. Just saying.

But on the bright side, sometime before my next period I'm going to sew up a bunch of cloth pads, so I won't have to fund the feminine hygiene industry anymore and can actually be comfortable all days of the month. I've found two patterns that I like, here and here. I think I might go to Union City sometime this weekend and look through the cotton flannels for good pad fabrics. Or I could splurge and get the material from the Hancock in Jackson. Treat the old girl right.

Now that I know when Housing is coming in (right when I was using the toilet, by the way), I suppose I can safely take a bath.

Oh, man. This journal entry is the stuff from which dreams are made. I want that hooooooooooouuuuuuuuuuuse! No, really, go back and click on that photo of the house, so it's big. Did that not just melt your previous conception of beauty?

Having free time is bad for my productivity. I am hanging out in a computer lab in the library under the pretense of doing homework for next week and working on Trivia Bowl questions (which I am, although it's mainly a matter of thinking of random facts about my favourite authors, and writing those down), but I'm mainly just enjoying wearing my leopard-print scarf and not having any midterms ahead of me.

I'm also trying to plan what to buy Dave for our second anniversary. (By the way, yay for us for having a second anniversary!)

And I'm excited about geocaching this weekend. I went out alone yesterday, and logged two finds after crashing through the woods alone. It was the first time I had done geocaching independently, and I felt really proud of my ability to use my GPS and navigate by myself. I'm used to being underestimated, and I felt like I was sticking it to the man with every bramble in which I got stuck. Also, because I found Homerun DVD Exchange (a.k.a. ammo box in the woods with movies inside), I got an Angelina Ballerina tape. Success!

Oh, and I found out today that the SGA approved my travel-study scholarship application, so I'm getting $600 to put toward my trip to Amsterdam! With that money and the deposit I paid, I only have to come up with a little over $1700... Which is a lot, but I can do it! I think it's worth it: My mentor/adviser is leading the trip, and it will be the first time I've traveled outside of the country, and the final project is a travel guide which will look really good on my curriculum vitae when I apply to MFA programs (and when I'm looking for freelance jobs).

I need to get out of this lab so I'll actually do some reading for American Lit and for my senior project... In conclusion, I think that the glass wall between the coffee shop and the computer lab is creepy, since it leads to one looking up from her work to realize that a guy she knows from class is sitting right across from her, possibly watching her, and it makes one horribly paranoid.

Is it weird that "Two-Headed Boy" by Neutral Milk Hotel always makes me feel wistful and romantic?

It's small talk, I know, but lately the weather has been ten sorts of lovely, getting colder and raining. My favourite days are the ones with barely any sun. If I can wear a sweater without dying of heatstroke, I'm happy, and I've been very happy lately. I love fall. And I need to make a big pot of chili and some corn muffins this weekend.

The Big-Ass Book of Crafts makes me want Kate and I to have our own apartment even more. We need to have a chair upholstered in brightly-coloured duct tape. And little boxes made of dominoes everywhere. And a wall-hanging made out of beans and lentils. And drinking-straw lamps. And decoupaged and painted plates. I think if we had an apartment on our own, even in the one year we'd be living there, it would be amazing and worthy of large picspam posts.

Neil Gaiman needs to write a new novel soon. I'd like one for adults, so I wouldn't finish it in two days, but I'm not picky. Another lovely Graveyard Book sort of thing would suffice. Or he could marry me and we'd keep bees together and live in his big old Victorian house, and I'd spend all my time writing and making him cabled fisherman sweaters and geocaching around Minneapolis. Either or.

Yeah, since getting my GPS unit for my birthday, I've been really, really, reeeeeaaaaaaaaally obsessed with geocaching. It's like treasure hunting, only you're mostly hunting for little canisters containing nothing but slips of paper you sign. Yeah, it is really nerdy. But you get to make an online profile and call people who don't geocache muggles. It's sort of like being a wizard, only about a hundred times better. I spent all day today thinking about going geocaching, and Kate and I came close to finding one I've searched for multiple times in the past, but my GPS batteries died right when I needed to use its compass. So drat and darn. I'm going to go buy lots of batteries after I've done homework and Dave gets out of Film History (call me unfeminist, but since rapists have been roving around town, I don't like going out at night without my manfriend with me), and try it again tonight. I might go to another cache that's proved itself to be elusive and surrounded by people staring at me and asking me what I'm doing in the past, sometime around one or two in the morning...? Maybe. I hate how having classes makes me, you know, sleep and be responsible and stuff.

Okay. I know that no one else is interested in geocaching, so I won't ramble on about it now. But I have one last thing to add: Geocaching in Amsterdam this spring when I'm on my travel-writing travel study is going to kick ass.

Also, my black Moor, Martin, finally died tonight. He'd gotten another of his fungus cases, and started lolling about the tank in a sickly way, so as insensitive as it sounds, I was pretty happy and relieved to flush him. Howard (the frog) is also pretty happy not to have Martin around anymore, and immediately started swimming around and climbing on the fake plants and eating freeze-dried shrimp with what looked like a smile on his froggy little face. He's not hiding underneath the Chinese bridge anymore. I think I'll clean the tank to get any vestiges of Martin-disease out of the water, and let Howard live on his own. I don't think he's nearly as social as all the Web sites about African clawed frogs let on.

Murgh. It's right difficult trying to force oneself to write a short story and a poem before a due date.

I had a great birthday. Right after midnight, Kate, Dave, and I went to Wal-Mart and bought wine coolers and flannel pajamas and then stayed up roughly until four playing Guitar Hero 5. Then Mom and Dad came up for lunch and I had my first margarita, which I liked. A lot. And then I spent the next couple of hours telling everyone how much I loved margaritas, before coming home, eating a piece of cake, and passing out until 7 p.m. I have the alcohol tolerance of a squirrel.

And I decided that class was not happening until 2 today, mainly because I still have homework to do.

Birthday highlights included a handmade Kanye West-themed card from Kate, Dave tricking me into believing that I was only getting a cell phone charger as a present, wine coolers and cheese, wine cooler for breakfast, buying craft books, cake that turns my teeth purple, and having $80 in iTunes money. (I did not enjoy discovering that Mighty Boosh episodes take 3 hours apiece to download. Which is why I only have The Call of the Yeti.)

Murgh. Homework, yes?

Sunday is my birthday, so I plan to be very, very responsible tonight in the way of finishing homework and cleaning, et cetera, because I am turning 21.

And I'm not planning some sort of drunken stupor or anything that's going to involve sick or being unintentionally naked or jumping off of things, but I'm turning 21. And I'm just not sure how useful I might be on Monday.

Also, I've been listening to so much trashy-sounding, electronic club music lately. It's great for essay writing, oddly.

Oh, and I found out today that Whip It (yeah, the really cute-looking movie about Ellen Page doing roller derby, ZOMG!) is going to be in Jackson, meaning I can actually see it before it's on DVD!

In conclusion, I am turning 21.

Huzzah for...

• no pelvic exams today and none until next June!
• cherry sours in the University Center market, and cherry sours not having gelatin in them!
• the weather being overcast all week!
• great, funny books about the Victorians!
• Edward Gorey!
• Belle and Sebastian!
• Friday!
• blowing off responsibility to hang out alone and read!
• my birthday on the fourth!

And I'm finally going to finish and post Chapter 3 of The Tea Sweeteners tonight!

Also, while we're talking about Edward Gorey, these videos are two of my most vivid memories from childhood.  I personally blame PBS for my obsession with old houses and graveyards.

First bits of The Tea Sweeteners posted! (At runaway_tales !)

That was incredibly fun to write, and if I didn't have class tomorrow, I would stay up all night and knock off Chapter 2. But I'm up too late, as it is.

P. S. There were people outside my window playing acoustic guitar a few minutes ago. Yeah, at one in the morning. It's been an annoying day, but at least it ended with accomplishment and cupcakes.

Today in Advanced Grammar we watched the most wonderful video about English being this omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent deity of languages the world over. Not only did it feature 1980s Soviet underground rock (yes!), but there was all this footage of random English schoolboys in sweaters (jumpers!) and tiny shorts, running around in the mud on their tiny legs playing soccer (football!). And then, they cut to this kid in, and I shit you not, A ROBE, wearing huge glasses, talking about how if you don't speak proper BBC English you'll be ostracized and ridiculed and no one will want to be your friend. (The implication seemed to be that anyone with a working-class accent would die alone and be fed to pigs. Naturally.) It was Harry Potter! (Well, no, it wasn't really, but you get the idea.)

I've tried to find it on YouTube, but all I can find is something with the same narrator talking about if you were born hearing certain bells, it means you're a true Londoner. But it's called The Story of English and came out in 1986 and made me indescribably happy this morning.

I'm pretty sure there's something offensive about my deep and abiding, perhaps fetishistic, love of English people. Personally, I blame my parents for letting me watch Mary Poppins so many times at such an impressionable age.

EDIT:

I found it! Start at around 7:10.

I'm six pages into my first Fiction Workshop assignment, and damn, do I feel like hot shit.

I watched this today during my marathon reading of ten chapters of Huckleberry Finn before 4 p.m., and it made my life inordinately better.

Last night I decided that Martin, who has been through such trial and strife, and who had spent the last several days staring at his own reflection, definitely needed friends, so I bought him some. I came home with two tetras, who I named Simone and Jean-Paul--why yes, that is a reference to existentialism--and an albino African clawed frog, who I named Howard. I now have one tetra and one frog. Well, I'm somewhat certain that I still have two tetras, but Jean-Paul appears to be wending his way through Howard's digestive tract at the moment, since a thorough search of my tank revealed no Jean-Paul and a happy, plump Howard doing what I call "making food hands" and seeming satisfied with himself.

I would be sad, but I feel much more connected to Howard on an evolutionary scale, since he has tiny hands, and since I discovered after doing a bit of research that Howard will grow to be about five inches long from nose to knees, and therefore would have made meals of Jean-Paul and Simone eventually, anyway. Martin is quite safe, since I couldn't fit him into my mouth if I wanted to, and itty bitty Howard definitely can't fit Martin into his own.

As it goes, I'm horribly attached to Howard, even after only one day with him. He is, in fact, named after the character Howard Moon, since I am abnormally obsessed with The Mighty Boosh and think that Julian Barratt just generally looks froggish. (In a pleasant way.)  I like to imagine Howard listening to jazz while hiding beneath the Chinese bridge in the fish tank, and when I discovered the murder of Jean-Paul tonight and Howard made food hands at me hungrily, I chided him with "Lies, lies, from tiny eyes" before indulging him with freeze-dried blood worms and shrimp. I'm a sucker for minuscule black toenails and the ability to shed one's own skin.

African clawed frogs can live to be over 25 years old, by the way, which is only one of the utterly fascinating African clawed frog facts I have learned and which I know interest no one other than myself. I read the story of one frog like Howard who was born in the early '80s and is, as far as I know, still alive. Which means that there is a frog out there who is older than me by eight years.

And I did consider buying a friend for Howard and naming him Vince. Unfortunately, all the other African frogs I looked at  who are not albinos have webbed hands, which means they're dwarf frogs. And tiny Vince would have been food for Howard in a matter of a month or so. Sadly, there will be no crimping in my tank.

Oh, and this video demonstrates what I mean by "making food hands." This frog is the same species and size as Howard:



And I am not ashamed that I look up frog videos on YouTube.