Thank Yous

Everyone around me is sick, but by some miracle of biology I haven't gotten sick yet. I'm sure I'll wake up tomorrow and go "Well fuck" and sneeze a lot, but I feel awesome currently.

I totally forgot to post these like I said I would. They're the Thank You PDFs I made everyone. Whoo InDesign. They're pretty crappy, but they were fun to do. Also yes I used the same giant gummy bear twice, don't hate.

















In other news, I'm probably going to have a job this summer. Wow! I've never had a legit job. (Sad huh?) At the TAMU Press. Doing marketing. Which means: designing brochures and fetching coffee. Otherwise, I'll be taking care of my grandmother all summer.

Finals in two weeks. Well, more like a week and a half. Should be fun.

CS

I've somehow managed to finish all of my homework for today, mainly because Beth had to go to the HRC to research Anne Sexton (... I don't know what to say about her, other than I am so glad she was not my mother) and so I sat in my room going, Wow, I rarely see this place in the daylight. So out of desperation I did work. And then I finished. And then I checked my email and hark, an email from the Undecided about doing design on a paper that's supposed to go to press next Wednesday (I bet if Mrs. Wellmann ever heard about how lackadaisical that paper is she'd have a heart attack). The email made me think: Oh dear, do I still know InDesign? So I've been making Thank You PDFs for everyone who gave me a birthday present. I'll post them here once I'm done. So far I've finished two. Out of I think ten. So, should be a good exercise.

When I wasn't eating or working on those, I was on this site, being utterly weirded out by stuff like this and this and this. The wonders of technology.

Back to InDesign now. I'm pretty excited about this designing thing... Oh wait, because I'd kind of like to do it for a living.

Two Things

One: I have recently finished The Three Musketeers, which, although it is egregiously misogynist, was excellent. I mean, it's like pulp fiction for 18th century France. Oh wait, that's what it was. It was much better than Count of Monte Cristo, not that Count was bad--Three Musketeers was just so energetic. And Athos, Porthos, and Aramis were just about the most brilliant characters a man could come up with, Aramis especially. Milady was also intriguing, but rather over the top, especially in the like nine million chapter CAPTIVITY section. And she might not have deserved her fate. Even though she was basically evil. She was just so smart. I wish the Cardinal would have been featured as extensively as she. That's really not a great review of the book, but I ought to be writing a journalism assignment instead of blogging so a deeper (and better) analysis will have to wait.

Two: Heh.

Notes on Three Books and an Administration

I have recently read the following:

• Flight vol. 5,
• Watchmen, &
• The Thief, by Megan Whalen Turner

Flight was good, as usual, and not nearly as depressing as usual, as an added bonus, possibly to offset the soul-sucking effect of Watchmen, which is, I will strongly advocate, one of the most depressing books I have ever read ever. I bought this latest Flight at Intellectual Property, on the Drag, which is going out business and having an excellent 50% off sale, along with Dykes to Watch Out For and, er, something else... hm. What was that. Can't remember. Whatever. Uh, anyway. To be perfectly honest I can't remember too much of Flight right now. All I can really remember is the story about the guy whose girlfriend gives him little people who go inside his brain. I liked that one.

Watchmen, oh my gosh, did three million people really have to die. Ozymandais is like the scariest person in the entire world. See, Watchmen is the type of book that makes you feel saddest when Bubasta (a, well, a mutant lynx) dies, instead of when a human meets the same fate. It is psychologically powerful in a difficult way—the emotions the novel evokes are not your ordinary ones, not even the ones you get from traditional dark classics like The Trial or As I Lay Dying. They're something a little more decrepit and debauched, like you're reading something you're not supposed to (especially in the chapter about Rorschach) and yet you are learning something deeply profound. So, go read it during the day.

The Thief, on the other hand, is just a refreshingly creative Newbery Honor book. The ending is excellent. I mean really good. Because it's just a book you're reading, and you've got the ending all planned out, and you're reading, and then you get to the end and you're like la la la holy fuck what do you mean wow.

The administration bit. I was watching an Obama press conference the other day and he gets asked a three part question, right? And he takes like five minutes to answer each part. So ten minutes into the question, after he's answered the first two parts, he repeats the third part of the reporter's question verbatim. And also he's so eloquent. And takes all of their questions so seriously. Like he... cares. So in love.

Uh... bonjour.

What? I'm writing an entry? Crazy!

It won't be very interesting. Or long. Few things.

1) Soo, Obama is president. Hot damn!!

2) omg Michael Phelps took a bong hit get over it

3) I am taking French, ack, merci beaucoup, I feel like Georgia.

4) I read the eighth Georgia book. Camping! The ninth needs to come out in paperback already.

5) I like tea. I am currently drinking tea. Mmm, tea.

6) I'm going to see Modest Mouse on March 4th at Stubb's. Wowzee!

7) The new Franz Ferdinand is not great and rarely have I been more disappointed.

8) I am taking fourteen hours this semester. Is niiiiiiiiice.

9) I have been reading as follows:

Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin
Yes I read it cuz of Obama. It was excellent. I cried at the end. Not when Lincoln died, but when Seward figured out Lincoln had died because Lincoln would have been the first person to come see him (Seward had also been injured in the assassination attempt). Also, I love Grant and hate McClellan.

Watchmen by Moore & Gibbons
Wow, this is definitely the most depressing anything I have ever read ever. I couldn't read it at night. I finished a chapter at one am one night and had to stay awake for another two and a half hours to get the taste of it out of my mind and I haven't picked it up since. I don't really like to think about it. It's worse than Feed. And yet, it's absolutely excellent and I should finish it sometime (during daylight).

The Shadow Thieves, Anne Ursu
Kids book. Not too bad (due to cleverness of description), but the plot sucked a whole lot, other than the surprise at the end that I totally should have seen coming. There were two good characters. The villain was crappy. So was Hades. The setup felt like a really bad takeoff of the Keys to the Kingdom series (by Garth Nix, so they're naturally awesome), because of the Mysterious Sickness and Bureaucratic Satire and Spunky Characters. Nix actually has an ounce of originality in his body (having recently reread the entire Abhorsen series, I can vouch loudly and obnoxiously for this), whereas this story was based on Greek myth. C'mon. Although she did really amusing and good descriptions. And Zee wasn't a half bad character.

Prep, Curtis... er... Stiggenfield? nah... ah, Sittenfeld
Absolutely amazing. Go read it. Right now. Don't look at the cover or be skeptical about the title. It's so damn good.

Dykes to Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel
See above comment re: Prep. (Unlike Prep, however, it was funny and had more lesbians. Always good. Oh and it's illustrated. Oh and you should read Fun Home by the same author. Oh and my copy is SIGNED!)

Love is a Many Trousered Thing, Louise Rennison
More of the same hilarity, but now with three potential love interests. And if you don't know she's going to end up with Dave the Laugh I will never speak to you again.

Long May She Reign, Ellen Emerson White
Fourth in the series. Not sure what the name of the series is. Basically, Meg is the president's daughter (as indicated by the first book, The President's Daughter. This one is particularly good. White has this thing where she writes very casually, as if she, the writer, isn't really there, but is just showing you the story through a clear pane of glass. The whole family is excellently caustic and self-destructive. I like that the books are so harsh. Things don't always go well (in fact, they often go quite badly), and then the characters talk about what happened like normal people. Or don't talk about it and make it worse, like normal people. Quite like normal people.