pride and prejudice

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waiting

I'm waiting for some water to boil (for coffee) and for some paint to dry (to put more paint on it) and for a baby to be born (not mine).

I can only be productive for so long, it turns out. Then my body and my mind together decide that it is time for recess. At which point I wander around the house, make coffee, eat food, stare out the window, and wait for things. I blame television for my short attention span, and elementary school for the idea that if I do my work at my desk without bothering anyone then I will get a snack. This kind of conditioning is hard to overcome.

I've been waiting for the baby for a pretty long time. He was due last week on Friday, and his mama's been in the hospital for a couple of days now. All my other friends and I are sending each other a lot of text messages - where's the baby? have you heard anything? what's going on? do you know anything yet? where's the baby?

We only send these messages to other people who are in the wrong city or state to know what's up. This is because we don't want to bother and annoy the people who are actually doing helpful things or who are in labor. But none of us are very patient people, so we can't just calmly and confidently wait for actual information. Instead we all have to frenetically ask all of the wrong people what is happening, every 47 minutes, and then reply to each other that I don't know! I haven't heard anything! No new news! I'll let you know as soon as I hear!

Okay, recess is over.

too much, too early, too soon

I am in the middle of trying to do 800 things at once, so I don't even have time to brush my hair, much less say interesting things to the internet. It's the end of school, and I have tests to take and projects to write.

Also I am going to Rwanda this summer, and I am trying to work out a research project there and am coming up against a lot of unpredicted, last-minute hurdles.

AND, because my time management skills are so awesome, I also agreed to hang an art show in a coffee shop for the month of May. It goes up Friday the 5th. And I need to make some paintings for it.

So wish me luck with getting any of these things done in any kind of functional manner...

Anyway, if you are in the Washington DC vicinity, you should come to my art show. It will be at Sparky's, which is on 14th NW between R and S. Paintings will be up all month, in the back room. On the 5th there will be some kind of opening hoopla with wine and beer and snacks. I don't know what time because I am too disorganized for that.

I mean, too artistic to be tied down by artificial constructs like "time."

I assume it will be around 7 or 8. That's when I'll be there anyway. Come see me!

A short story about how I "did homework" for 4 hours last night without getting anything done

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"Jesus is alive, and Cecily is 27!"

This is what Emily said in an email this morning. And it is all true. Especially the part about being 27.

My science party was very fun. And scientific. Everyone complained a lot when I made up a Science Exam, but in the end it was my favorite part. That and watching people drink beer through long scientific tubes.

Now that it is my birthday, I wish I had done more homework yesterday instead of making up party activities. Because I have to email a project to a professor TODAY. On my BIRTHDAY. On EASTER SUNDAY! This Linguistics School is hard core!

I ate cake and ice cream for breakfast, after I woke up at noon. So I guess I better get on the ball here pretty quick. But for now I am still wandering around the house in my cowboy pajamas, petting my cat and drinking coffee. Mmmm, coffee. Time for a refill.

moving on to more important things:

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That's right. It's almost my birthday! Last year the theme of my birthday party was "Tequila and Fancy Walkin"

This year, it is Science.

I went to AxMan when I was in Minnesota and bought a lot of science garb. And supplies. Including Anatomy Frog! My friend Kate works there and she secretly gave me free Science for my early birthday present. Thanks Kate!

The rest of my trip to Minnesota was swell. I saw lots of people I like, and only one person I don't like. And I didn't talk to her.

Now my nose is back to the grindstone and it is going to have to stay there for 2 solid weeks if I want to be able to attend my own birthday party. Wish me luck with that, although knowing my superhuman powers of concentration and my congenital inability to procrastinate, I probably won't even NEED any luck.

Ha! Ha!

Tell me if you need an invitation to my party, I'll give you directions.

field trip

Next Friday, March 31st, in the morning, I have a qualifying examination. "Quals" it is called in English at my school, and the ASL sign is basically warding off evil. The test is to see if I qualify to stay in this linguistics program. So far, I'm pretty sure I do, and I am pretty good at taking tests, but still this all involves studying and stress and tossing and turning in my bed at night.

So, as a reward to myself for having done a good job (or, as the case may be, a consolation prize for having to come up with a new life plan) I will be flying to Minneapolis in the afternoon after I take the test, and hanging out in Minnesota for the weekend.



What everyone needs! A weekend getaway in Minnesota! In March!

Ha, ha. In reality, I am going at that specific time because some particular people that I like are having a CD release party and my best friend is having a baby shower and also I need to leave the east coast for a little while before my will to live is sucked from my body and I am left a hollow shell of the vibrant Montanan I used to be.

Melodramatic? What?!

Anyway the cd release party is the band of Chris Koza, one of my favorite people of all time. Partly because I think he is going to be famous one day and I hope to ride his coattails to unimaginable wealth and prestige. But mostly because he is so great.

The rest of the people in the band are great too. Luke Anderson, for instance, is not only the best drummer in the universe, but he also made me a super fabulous webpage that is beautiful and gets me tons of compliments all the time. Those other guys are Pete and Justin, and they are great too. Pete has excellent taste in footwear, and I'm kind of scared of Justin because he has better glasses than me.

You can especially tell how great they all are by the fact that they are standing on those chairs, which is very avant-garde and witty, and also, look how attractive these young men are! We all know that the only way to judge a book is by its cover, and the same certainly holds true for musicians.


photo: David DeYoung www.howwastheshow.com

Besides being extraordinarily handsome and interesting and funny, these guys are also the kind of musicians who everyone really likes and wants to listen to and awards them prizes and honors and writes positive comments about them in newspapers. This even happened in the newspaper in my very own hometown of Missoula, Montana.

So, if you want to be like me and have lots of famous rock star artist friends, you should meet me at the Turf Club on April 1st. This is not a funny April Fools joke! I am serious!

home improvement

You will be happy and relieved to know that my drill-buying errand last week was a success. But you will be saddened to learn that I did not buy any little plastic anchor items, so the art is still piled up in a disorganized way. Soon I will go to the hardware store for the anchors, but I will not be going back to Home Depot, because I hate it there.

I only hate the one by my house. All the other ones I've been to have been reasonably okay. I bought the stuff I needed and the staff were helpful with, if baffled by, my requests. I think last time was to buy a bunch of 4' x 18" sauna tubes, because I needed them to build some castles for an elementary school play. And one time before that was to buy a lot of dryer tubing to string up over Christmas lights and decorate for a big party.

Anyway, I digress. The Home Depot here is dark and understaffed and the staff who are there are really cranky and I was just buying a drill! Not even anything weird! So next time I will be going to a friendly neighborhood hardware store that is not owned by evil corporate overlords.

P. S. My trip to New York was fun. I didn't drink any green beer, but I did drink some regular beer-colored beer, and it was delicious.

I'm a travelling man

I'm going to New York today on the Chinatown bus. I love the Chinatown bus. The one I'm taking doesn't actually go to any Chinatowns; in Washington DC it runs from McPherson Square and it goes to Penn Station in New York. But whatever. I still love it.

In New York I will be thinking about how I should be doing my homework, and instead wandering around looking at things. Plus also tomorrow I will be wearing some green clothes and drinking some (hopefully) green beer.

My spring break has been very productive so far, so I feel confident that when I spend the weekend not doing anything, it won't cause me to flunk out of grad school. Or if not "confident" then "hopeful." Here's what I did so far:
1 midterm
1 trip to the bank
1 data collection plan
1 trip to the library
2 syntax homeworks
4 paintings
5 pots of coffee
6 beers
8 million pages of reading.

So as you can see, I TOTALLY deserve a trip to New York. We are not discussing the things I still have left to do because right now it is time to focus on my trip to New York. On the Chinatown bus.

Bye! See you next week!

Dear Big M States,

Here is a picture of my bare feet, next to some flowers:



You might be wondering when this picture was taken. For example, you might think it was taken last spring, in like April or May or something like that. But you would be WRONG, because in fact I took that picture about 20 minutes ago. Because over here in Constitution Land, it is 86 DEGREES outside.

That's right. In MARCH. Too bad for you, all you dwellers of the frozen north.

Your friend,
Cecily

vacation

I'm on spring break. And, as it turns out, the Constitution Gods are on spring break too- yesterday and today it is 70 degrees around here. I accidentally thought it was still March when I went outside so I wore my jacket, and boy was I ever sorry. Sorry and hot.

So I took my jacket off and carried it. Because I am a very resourceful girl.

Now that it is Spring Break, I have all kinds of business to attend to. Today, for example, I need to buy coffee and a drill. The coffee is because we are out of coffee, because I drank it all. The drill is because we still have thousands of boxes of art that we can't put on our walls without a drill. All the walls are very fragile and unpredictable plaster from 1920, so we have to buy those little anchors and whatnot, and then drill holes to put nails in.

I am not very excited about this, because I prefer the method of hanging things on the wall that involves me balancing precariously with one foot on the windowsill and the other foot on the bookshelf, and some nails in my mouth, trying to nail and align the art and not crash to the floor, all at the same time. This drill-and-plastic-anchor thing seems like it requires way too much forethought and planning: not my strong points.

Otherwise I will be doing a lot of homework.

Theoretically.

Plus also I am going to New York.

the Linguistics Department is dangerous

I fell down the stairs (ahem. ONE stupid stair) and broke myself.

Well, it's not really broken, it is just a stupid sprain. But it hurts! And I can't walk! And I am very bored!

Boo, hoo.

Valentine's Day

One of my mom's art students (a seven-year-old) made this Valentine's Day card for his little second-grade art student sweetheart last year. It's a pretty good valentine, although maybe not one I myself would really care to receive:

"Dear Marina,
If you have another Valentine's then that's O.K. I just want to be your Love, don't worry about that. Yeah so me and Julie are leaving to Hawaii so by[e] now I miss you."

Then, you will notice, there is a drawing of Cupid flying around, saying "be patient and think"

which is good advice for all of us, but again, not what I would prefer to hear from my Valentine and/or Love while he is on his way to Hawaii with some other girl.

"accessibility"

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A Biography of Gerald Ford, in Portuguese

My newest favorite way to waste time is to read all the archives of Overheard in New York. Seriously I think I have spent about 10 hours over the last week reading that website. It's addictive and I'm obsessive so we're like a match made in heaven.

My other old standby favorite way to waste time was watching Law & Order on television, but as of this morning, we no longer have a television at my house. There was a breakup and a custody battle and the loser (in an extremely superficial sense, unrelated to actual human feelings, since I wasn't one of the breaking up parties) was me. Me and my evenings of watching Law & Order. Adieu, Detective Vincent D'Onofrio! I'll miss you!

Since I couldn't watch any crappy dramedies this evening, instead I started watching Issue # 1 of Wholphin, which is some kind of highbrow arty DVD publication from those guys at McSweeney's. It came free when I bought a copy of the Believer, which is their literary review magazine publication that I LOVE.

Anyway I am sad and disappointed by the DVD, because although it is full of what look like fine performances by people I admire (Miranda July! Spike Jonze! David Byrne!), none of it is captioned. I still watched part of it and I'll probably watch the rest at some point, because the visual element is not to be sneezed at. But there's a bunch of stories and people talking and I'm sure it would all be much more enthralling if I knew what they were saying.

I wasn't really expecting captions, because McSweeney's included a DVD with issue 11 of their quarterly. And on that DVD, there are captions, but mostly they are not in English. And none of them are captions of what is happening on the DVD. The notes in the back of the book say this:

*Subtitles available; drawn from The History of the Goths and Visigoths in German and Portuguese.
**Subtitles available; drawn from A Biography of Gerald Ford, in Portuguese.
U.S.S. Indicates that the author is in the Navy, and thus the reading is audio-only.
***Subtitles available; drawn from Spenser's The Faerie Queene; in Spanish.
+Subtitles available; drawn from the Book of Genesis.

I do see the humor in this, and I am a great appreciator of absurdity and nonsense and hilarious jokes. However, if you are deaf, watching this DVD (which is a "documentary" of the making of the issue of the quarterly literary journal) is tedious and annoying with no subtitles, and it doesn't become any less so if you turn the Portuguese Gerald Ford Biography subtitles on.

The "English Subtitles" option on DVDs is not because the people who make DVDs are stupid, it's because some people can't hear the spoken English.

The McSweeney's DVD may be tedious and annoying even when you can understand it. I'm sure some people, at least, think so. Sadly, I have no way to judge either the documentary or the newer Wholphin issue on its own merits. Which is too bad for the McSweeney's guys, because I really like almost everything those McSweeney's guys come up with. I buy their books and their magazines and their t-shirts and their bookplates. And I would probably like and buy and say nice things to my friends about their DVDs, too, if they hadn't decided that accessibility was too banal to be included.