Speaking of ‘Precious’

I have said before that my life, which people who aren’t me seem to think should be some sort of action-packed romp around the Continent, doesn’t exactly resemble the sort of thing that Hemingway and Fitzgerald wrote about. Normally this is a point of some consternation for me. The other day, as I wept into my mid-afternoon martini about the sheer unglamorousness of being me, I recalled this quotation from Hemingway that is just So My Life. (That’s a slight exaggeration. It was a Pims and Lemonade.)

Several days later I have mustered enough get-up-and-go to locate the quotation. Which is written in a notebook. A notebook that is sitting on my desk. The desk where I spend copious amounts of time every day.

Not that I’m doing anything productive during the time I’m sitting at my desk. You see, I am a young procrastinator. I am full of ideas and inspiration and good intentions, I just happen to be terminally lazy. That notebook I mentioned with the quotation written in it? It’s basically full of sketches and outlines of a year’s worth of harebrained schemes. Of all these things I want to write about.

Do you know what I should be writing about right now? I should be writing inquiry letters and cover letters to potential employers about how awesome and motivated I am. I should be writing my dissertation on museum education for students with Autistic Spectrum Disorders. What am I actually writing? This blog. A review of Oreo cookies for no useful reason whatsoever. Instant messages. Because I will leave the things that I should be writing and should be doing until the last possible moment, until right before it’s too late to share them.

Which reminds me…the quotation:

You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see. You hang around cafes.

-The Sun Also Rises

I really didn’t intend for this entry to sound so nihilistic and, well, precious. The stuff that needs to get done will get done. Eventually. In the meantime I have some drinking in cafes to attend to.

Today I Will Blog About Blogging

I tend to have so many browser windows open that I send my computer into fits of hysterics. (And I have a Mac. It is very difficult to send a Mac into hysterics, for they are stoic and unflappable machines.) Then I have to restart, thereby losing all the open windows. Because of this AND because I award myself a self-indulgent point over at Joe’s Goals every time I update a blog I have decided to post about all my open browser windows. In essense I will be Telling You What I Think, cleverly using other peoples’ words to do so. Genius! Of the strictly derivative sort!

First of all, I am clearly elated that it looks like Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States of America. I am terribly excited to be be excited about a politician. Both my Governor and my Congressional representative have had titillating and ruinous sex scandals in the past couple of months, and my Senator is doing the right wing’s job for them, so you can see where I might be wary of indulging in the Politician Love, but there you go. According to the Huffington Post, this election cycle is so exciting that politics sells better than sex at the moment. I posit that no, actually they just go together like llama llama llama, a dippity ding da dong. See: the news. See also: the strange sexual perversions of politics nerds. Ahem.

In addition to the usual suspects (Gmail, Facebook, Livejournal, The Daily Kos, The New York Times and the Huffington Post…sorry I can’t be bothered to make those into links) I also have this news story open: Limbaugh Comes Out for Obama. Everyone’s favorite complete asshole (I have more respect for Bill O’Reilly. Really.) has been running “Operation Chaos”, urging his listeners to cross party lines in open primaries and vote for the Democratic candidate who will have the hardest time beating John McCain in November. Now that we have a presumptive nominee (although I would argue that we don’t–Obama is no more presumptive now than he was before Tuesday’s primaries) and it isn’t Senator Clinton, the candidate Rushy wanted Republicans to vote for, he is claiming that the whole thing? It was an elaborate double cross! He wanted Obama to win because he will have a harder time beating McCain. He just told Republicans to vote Clinton so that people would think he believed her to be the weaker candidate. I guess he thinks that not only Republicans listen to his voting advice, but that Democrats do as well. “Well if he wants people to vote Clinton we had better vote Obama, don’t you think Mildred?”

HA! Joke’s on you, Donkey face! Limbaugh has declared Operation Chaos a rousing success because now it looks like Obama will be the nominee. He fooled you! (To say nothing of the Republican dupes who voted Clinton.) He is the master of the double cross!

But wait! If he was trying to manipulate Democratic voting patterns before, who is he trying to manipulate now? Perhaps he is trying to scare the superdelegates into endorsing Clinton! Perhaps the whole thing is a triple cross! Perhaps, perhaps!

Oh wait, why should Democrats listen to him? (Why anyone should listen to him is beyond my comprehension, but I mean listen to him in the sense of “take his words to heart” and not “tune into his radio program.”)

Whatever happens, know that Rush Limbaugh will declare himself and Operation Chaos a success. That’s all that matters. Eight years of President Obama followed by eight years of President Clinton? Victory for Rushy! Let’s make him that victorious, OK?

It seems that instead of blogging about blogging I ended up blogging about politics. I should go read some gossip blogs or something.

In other news, I have my tickets to the midnight showing of Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull or whatever it’s called! My friends are having a garden party with frilly hats and Pims and croquet! There has been actual sunshine the past few days! I will be living in Camden (London, not New Jersey) this summer! (If you are going to be in London this summer and have any interest in performance art give me a shout. We’re planning something big, where by “we” I mean my friend Kat and I.) I have become an exclamation point abuser!

OK, time for dinner then drinks. The rest of my day consisted of lunch then drinks. Grad school is very taxing.

You Can’t Make This Shit Up #1

So, I have been missing. If you are surprised by this you probably don’t know me very well and ergo you are probably not reading this blog right now. So I don’t know why I am addressing you, you non-existent person you, but it might have something to do with the fact that I haven’t had my giant mug of tea yet.

Why have I been missing? Aside from being “around” I have also been in Brussels, Prague and head off to Ireland on Saturday. Mostly this post is just an excuse to brag about that. Also I had several weeks of actual work to complete. This was a real shock to my University of Leicester Department of Museum Studies system, hear you me. Anyway, hi.

The other reason for this post is to share with you one of those internet sites you just can’t make up. Maybe it will be a regular feature! Probably I will forget about it. But this? Hopefully this will be emblazoned into your mind for all time.

The Apple Store Dating Blog!

Apparently this is the dating hot-spot for technophiles everywhere! In my experience they are usually staffed by 12 year old boys, but apparently I am just not going to the right stores. (I also seem to frequent the pubs filled with 12 year old boys. My life is very hard.)

Anyway, travel, actual work and sharing a martini over by the iPod Nanos. Life, eh?

Bourgeois Blogging… now with more Respectability and Legitimacy! (TM)

Oh, look what I found on DailyKos while I was procrastinating writing my paper about the challenges to the authenticity and authority of museums posed by the Internet! (That’s not really the thesis or anything, just a Big Simplification. I am all “up with the Internet!” so such a paper would hardly be my style.)

Incidentally, I am currently writing the section about blogs.

Are Blogs Becoming Respectable and Legitimate?  I’m going to go ahead and be contrarian and posit no. Rest assured, Internet, there will always be at least one completely disrespectable and illegitimate blog out there. That is my pledge to you.

Plea

I’m not really here, it’s an illusion (Michael!). I just want to ask you all a favor.

But first a quick update! I had a rather nightmarish return from the US, where I waited for over 6 hours at Heathrow for a National Express coach back to Leicester. I hate National Express, their approximately 6x a day route to Leicester (and 3 or 4 other places, so the bus is mobbed), the unreliability of an open return ticket, and the unreliability of air travel that necessitates an open return ticket. Thank God my friends Jenna and Kat were at the airport too or I probably would have lost my mind. I went for almost 30 hours without sleep on that particular travel…. no fun!

When back in Leicester I got to speed-write the WORST paper ever. It involved filling out the documentation paperwork that would be required if you were accessioning an object into your museum collections and then–get this–writing a 4,000 word essay explaining how you filled in the 3 forms. There is just no way to make that sound smart. It reads like it was written for small children. If you know anyone with an IQ of 70 who wants to learn how to document museum accessions, I’m your girl.

Then I’ve had some class and stuff. Currently I’m doing laundry. I don’t know how I can stand this whirlwind life of mine; I clearly have exemplary stamina.

And now for my request: If you know anyone (American citizen) currently living outside of the country with an interest in politics who might want to contribute to a group blog about Election 2008, could you please point them in my direction? I’m trying to set one up, and am particularly looking for conservatives if you know any. They’re a bit harder to find outside the US. I’m also NOT looking for anyone who fits the profiles of Jenna and myself, since we’ve probably got the ‘over-privileged white kid with her head up her ass while temporarily living in England’ demographic pretty well covered. Please send people my way if you (and they) feel so inclined. It’s a WordPress blog so anyone who is going to be added to it would need a WordPress account. With a non-pornographic name. But it can be anything else!

Cross-posted approximately everywhere.

Wherein I Commit Internet Blasphemy

Now I know that this is a positively dreadful thing to do, but I am updating this blog… to point you in the direction of my other blog.

It’s newer! It’s shinier! It’s…well, newer about covers it really.

I made it so I could expound, at great length, on every 12th century stone I will trod on, every storied Victorian-era pub I will imbibe in, and every bureaucratic roadblock I will run into while I earn my MA in England. That is to say, it might veer tragically towards the narrative. It’s also so my mom can keep track of me, and to save me from the social faux-pas that would surely accompany any mass-emailing attempts. I would probably accidentally leave off far too many people, and would (again accidentally) include people whose dearest wish was to never hear from me again. Besides, emailing is far too much like keeping in touch and we all know that’s something I hardy do.

So now it’s up to them/you. I shirk emotional maturity and social responsibility; I blog, fool!

Oh right, the link: Flying (By the Seat of My Pants)

Things That Are Happening in the World

Despite my giant hiatus, I promised that this blog wasn’t dead. It’s not, it just seems I have very little to say.

So I will link you to other people saying things. I bring you the first edition of Things That Are Happening in the World:

1. Somewhere in the world, I am vomiting a little in my mouth. This is why. One the giant scale of awful, Kiddie Prom is only about 5 slots below Kiddie Porn.
2. Somewhere in the world, someone is finding this journal by Google-ing the last two words in the item above.
3. A quick perusal of BBC news indicates at least 3 floods (and one “more probable than it once was” flood), massive fires in Greece, an impending plague of locusts and one cosmic nothingness. I’m not even going to attempt to count the bombings.
4. Somewhere in the world people are waiting for the Second Coming. Somewhere in the world, still others are scratching their heads at this.
5. Somewhere in the world, my 86 year old Nana just got a mobile phone!
6. Right here and right now, I am going to bed. Actually, first I’m going to read a fashion magazine and then I’m going to bed.

Sorry this was such a boring entry kids. Maybe its  best if I don’t update when I don’t have anything to say…

Atchung!

This blog is not abandoned. I repeat, this blog is not abandoned. It is just severely neglected. And not for any interesting reasons, either.

Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows Review:

I posted this on my Livejournal last night, and now I am posting it here. I’m using the “more” tag so that no one is inadvertently spoiled for the last installment of Harry Potter. W00t.

IDK, my BFF Snape?

So I finally finish Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, am all set to write my darn review, and Livejournal crashes! Not that I don’t want to grace you all with my review, (the short version: compelling, yet made me yearn for a red pen) but LJ is just better suited for that sort of thing. Or at least it is if you’ve got tangential ties to Harry Potter fandom.

In addition to Livejournal, my computer went and crashed the other day. It went down in a blaze of glory, which is to say it flickered, froze, and would not restart. The Mac Genius Bar folks couldn’t recover anything, and so now I start afresh with a new hard drive. I’m very seriously considering investing in a .mac account so that I can back up everything, including my favorite places, on Mac’s servers.

Today’s entry is brought to you by the search terms “equine penis” and “draco malfoy shirtless.” Because I am running a porn ring of bestiality and lukewarm evil.