I forgot to blog about New Year's Resolutions yet this year. This is terrible of me, I mean, what is this blog without the New Year's Resolution post? This year I have already accomplished my resolution. Most resolutions are stupid because they have no ending, or at least they aren't seen as having an ending. If someone resolves to work out more, and in the first few weeks they work out an hour a day, which is more than they did in the whole month of December from the previous year, then they really have accomplished their goal, but, silly people, they still feel kind of bad when they stop after those first few weeks. That's what's wrong with most resolutions. This year, I resolved to finish Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which I had been reading on and off since October. And I did, a week into the new year. So now I have this feeling of accomplishment boosting my ego for the whole year. I can say, well, it's been a pretty slow year, but I did accomplish my resolution. I Rule. Oh, and it was good, by the way, you should read it.
I'm realizing that I need a way to sign off emails to professors and non-intimate friends. I used to use "Peace" but that sounds cliche, but really besides that all I have is "Love" and that just doesn't work most of the time. Closing words are almost like signatures, people choose one and go with it for all their professional correspondence. There are the "Regards" people, the "Best" people, the "Take Care" people. How does one choose one of these words to represent herself? They all seem to throw off the whole tone of my email. They come right at the end and they say "oh yeah, I don't know you very well and I'm trying to sound acceptable while keeping my distance." And I know that's a perfectly appropriate thing to say in an email to a professor. I just hate formality.
And along the same lines of presenting myself, I put all my books and CDs and DVDs on shelves yesterday in my livingroom. I like having them on shelves. I just wish there was some way to introduce myself to people solely through the books I have on shelves. "Hello, this is me: Harry Potter, Madeleine L'Engle, Anne Lamott, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Robin McKinley, Edmund Spenser, E. Nesbit, Susan Cooper, St. George and the Dragon, Edith Hamilton . . ." I hate having to explain myself, casually dropping allusions, as if wanting to have the same tastes as someone else was something to be ashamed of. On the other hand, if I only had friends with the same tastes as me that would be stupid. I need my friends to say crazy things like "the new Justin Timberlake album is amazing" so I can become who God wants me to be. I don't know if that makes sense, but it makes sense in my head.
Ah, my time in the great Midwest is drawing to a close. These past few days I've been working on some stuff for my research assistantship this coming semester, so the time's gone by pretty fast. I've mainly been finding info to add to a bibliography my prof sent me--finding page numbers and first names of authors and stuff. It's like a scavenger hunt with me and Google on a team. We are winning.
I've also been reading lots of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (and there's lots of it to read) and watching Ralph Bakshi films. We watched the interview of him on the Wizards DVD, that man is crazy and hilarious. He was convinced that Wizards was a great family film. I'm not so sure. He really doesn't like Disney, either. He explained that he released Wizards to kind of show Disney how it's done, since they kept putting out such "sop." And we also learned about rotoscoping, which is that super cool technique of animating over real film. Bakshi uses a lot of stock footage in his films. In Wizards it's the Nazi footage, in Lord of the Rings it's some Russian film footage. The first feature film to use rotoscoping all the way through is Waking Life, and the technique is also used in those Charles Schwab commercials that have been on lately, like that one of the woman riding the ski lift.
This week, also, Mom started a blog. I helped. Check it out, it's all pretty on blogspot.