you live your life as if it's real

 OI. I totally forgot to flail about Made of Honor!

I saw it last Saturday with my darling titania_torres, and omg yay Scotland! Okay, so they were mostly making fun of Scottish traditions, lolololol haggis is made out of gross things, and so on.

But there was highland dancing! (Not especially impressive technically, and they just showed like two shedding movements, but whatever! Highland dancing! Done properly!* In a movie!) And there was caber tossing! And sporrans! And lots of kilts! And bagpipes! And when I left the theatre, I was singing the Laddie cause the main Scottish guy (the one the female lead is going to marry) plays it at one point. The other tunes they played on the bagpipes during the course of the movie were all really familiar ones too.

Seriously though. Awesome. I guess I should have expected it, since the trailers clearly say they all go to Scotland, but for some reason it never occured to me that Hollywood cramming every stereotype possible into the movie would include dancing. So I got really excited when all of a sudden the screen was full of ghillies, wool socks, and second position.

bluebonnets, someday we should totally get all the dancing-types together, rent this and pretend we're back in Scotland. There were no chocolate muffins though, which is how you know it's not realistic.

(Other than the highland dance nerd factor, it was a pretty good movie. A nice chick flick. Jokes, good looking man, happily ever after, you know.)

And xsilvan, where are youuuu? I just found out that I have to go to my family reunion, so I have a couple days less time in Ottawa =(  Now I get in sometime the night of Thursday the 26th, then Saturday afternoon to Monday morning I'm in Brockville. So Friday, d'you want to do something?

*Anyone ever see Fred Astaire pretend to highland dance? I forget what movie it was in, but it was brutal and made me cry in my heart a little bit. Actually come to think of it, it might have been Gene Kelly. I've seen a lot of old dancing movies, okay, give me a break.

 In nerdy and belated news,

Saw Ironman on Monday, and OMG wow it is much love. The same sort of much love as Transformers.

-fangirls-

ALSO! The trailer for the new Batman movie played, and it looks AMAZING. Amazing.

-fangirls more-

 

In non-fangirl related news, in no particular order, today I:
- found out the concert in NYC is cancelled.
- did not write one single word of my essay, even though it was due 21 minutes ago.
- signed a lease and paid a deposit for a place to live come September.
- did not study Herodotus, even though I have a test on it tomorrow.
- watched Buffy.
- went to class.
- posted a dii crit.

I am an unproductive idiot. Tomorrow has got to be better. But I guess having a place to live is pretty important...

My newly dyed hair and I went to Toronto today to go to a booksigning at the World's Biggest Bookstore, which both greatly disappointed me and made me very happy. The bookstore, of course, not the signing -- the signing was more than I expected. I think that any bookstore worth its salt should either be very crowded and dark and crammed full of so many old dusty books that it looks like it could turn into a fantasy set piece at any moment, or else very light and comfy and airy with lots of armchairs. Since I had some time to kill before the signing, I was really hoping for the latter. (It was just a giant box store. Full of many wonders, which I will get to in a moment...)

So instead I walked over to the Eaton Centre and got some lunch there, and then meandered my way back along Yonge St. Stopped in at the huge HMV there, and bought Enjoy Incubus, so now my Incubus collection is complete, yayyy! Also bought the String Quartet Tribute to Incubus, on the theory that I adore the String Quartet Tribute to HIM, so maybe I will like this one too? I'm having a lot of trouble imagining Incubus songs as string arrangements though. Haven't listened to it yet.

Alors, having killed enough time (silly ol' Greyhound really did not make its schedules conducive to my purpose, and I actually had to wake up before 8 to get to Toronto in time for a signing at 1), I beelined for the sf/f section of the store. (Yes, I beelined for it all the way from the HMV. Get outta my way, cars! I have books to buy!)

And boy, did I ever score big. I had to exercise great self-restraint and there was many a moment of wishing that it was still before Christmas. January is such a bad time of year to throw me in a bookstore. But anyways, I'm very happy with what I did get, and I can get a lot of the stuff I passed on elsewhere, so. I am a happy bunny. And the booksigning started shortly after.


Now I will try and write past the sticky in "Sparagmos". And I won't force David to wear a sparkly blue shirt in it, even though that's what I saw pretty much as soon as I started seriously pondering. As David pointed out, he dies in a very unpleasant way in this story, the least I could do is leave him his male pride.

Across The Universe?

Fucking fantastic.

Um yeah. Seriously. Amazing. It's been nearly twenty-four hours and I still am not coherent on the subject. Great movie.

Incredibly moving. So, so sad for a good chunk of the middle. Really interesting re-envisionings of the Beatles songs. (I particularly enjoyed Let It Be... half young boy's solo, half gospel chorus, it was wicked. And really sad.)

You know, I think in general, cathartic would be a good way to describe this movie. At least for me... it really was dragging you through a bunch of insane emotions (and a bunch of acid trips) and tragedy to let you purge yourself of those emotions and be able to resume normal life. Or maybe that's just a product of my feeling much less than sane the past while, and studying way too much ancient Greek history/writing.

Anyways, that's how I felt. And it featured two very cute boys, one with a very wonderful accent. And I loved Prudence's character... actually, all the other characters too. They really... I don't know quite how to describe it. They're the sort of characters who so clearly have their own lives and a million different personality quirks that you never get a chance to see on-screen, but that doesn't mean they aren't there. They have history, and a future beyond what you see. They're real.

And I love musicals, especially when the songs are well integrated into the narrative and all the lyrics and the mood and the instrumentation and everything just makes the whole atmosphere of the movie so charged. Which the songs in this movie were. (Though I'm thinking, just a hunch, that if you don't like the Beatles, you won't care so much, but still worth giving it a shot. Because yeah, re-envisioning and all. It's awesome. And did I mention the cute boys?)

And hey, any movie with Eddie Izzard reminding me weirdly and strongly of Tim Curry has got to be good.

This is why I should never be a movie critic.

 omgomgomgomgomgomgomg Guy Gavriel Kay is COMING TO MY ENGLISH CLASS!!!!


aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!

(I can b fangurl nao plz?)

No, but seriously, Kay is one of my biggest role models and sources of inspiration. I love everything I've ever read of his, and I own all but one (to my knowledge). His books always give me that "holy fuck, this is what I want to do with my life... but I'm not good enough and I'll never be this good... but I have to try..." feeling/motivation. He's genius.

So yeah. I am SO PSYCHED. If this somehow falls through, I will be devastated.

Hm, what else happened since last I updated? Well, the weekend was the reunion bbq (wheeee, fun!), shopping, a wee dinner party, and some more getting ready for school/unpacking. I am mostly all settled in... pretty much I now just need to decide where I want to shove stuff I won't need for a long time (winter coat, etc.). As is, that stuff is sitting unobtrusively along one wall. It can stay there for a wee while, but not forever.

School was fun yesterday, except the whole boy-I-hate-more-than-anything-else-is-in-grk-and-just-as-awful-as-ever part. I really think that in a few weeks' time I won't be able to handle him anymore and will have to email the professor asking him to do something about it. And I know I'll be speaking on behalf of the entire class.

Holy shit. Stopped writing this for a while to eat and chat with my darling Stephanie (who has spoiled me rotten today, buying me bubbletea AND making me dinner), but now there's the most awesome storm raging outside. Turns out the view from the 9th floor is amazing for storm-watching. We could see the wind making the rain sheet off the parking lot almost straight back up into the air again, and I've never appreciated just how much sky I can see from my window until I see the lightning streak across all of it. And the rain still pounds against the windows; all I miss is the sound of rain hitting the roof. Which, admittedly, is one of my all time favourite sounds in the world. Some people find it annoying, I find it incredibly soothing. Especially if it's a tin roof.

And now the sky is clearing, with little patches trying to pretend that it's still late afternoon and all the world is sunshine and lollipops, and other patches stubbornly remaining big bad ass clouds threatening doomsday. And a bird returns, winging madly from wherever it took temporary shelter to wherever it lives. Still, I don't think we're going to see the sunset tonight, folks. The badass clouds are beating the happy lollipop patches.

Okay, so, where was I before weather happened? School, right. So latin and greek are both scary as all hell, though greek is more so, naturally. I have hours of homework to do for both courses that I haven't started yet (oh yeah, off to a rockin' start) and since latin is tomorrow, I really should get on that...

Today I had greek history, myth and english (arthurian legend). I've already done most of the squee-ing for english, with one exception: I can choose to write a story instead of an essay! ZOMG! Sounds like time for thinly disguised MZB Mists of Avalon fanfiction, to me! Hey, maybe I should write some Arthur x Lancelot slash, and justify it as bringing the saga into the 21st century. I bet that would work, actually...

Oh man, the more I think about that, the more I like it. Updates will follow.

Erm, what happened in the other classes... fairly standard intro classes, not terribly exciting. Mind-blowing-fact-of-the-day (from grk hist): at Dimini, a Greek settlement from the Late Neolithic Period (c. 3800 BC) they found human remains, specifically of children who were buried under the house floors. Then the whole class sort of went "ugh!" so the professor had to clarify that this was a common practice of the time. So cool! I want to know so badly why they did it... I can think of lots of reasons why they might (the childrens' spirits still need protection; their spirits will be good forces to ward off bad ones; etc.) but I want to know for sure... those are just speculations, the professor didn't say at all.

Not much else of note, except that Karl (or possibly Carl) is in my grk hist class and that really surprised me. Dude, he's a chem major. But he's a cool guy, so I'm pretty excited for the chance to get to know him better. I liked how when the prof started actually teaching, he sat up straighter and went "oh, I like this class!" XD. It was pretty much what I was doing in my head... he just said it out loud.

In other really nerdy news, when my engl prof told us Kay was coming, she was like "any Guy Kay fans out there?" and a few other people raised their hands... pretty sure I was the only one whose hand shot straight up into the air instantaneously. Whups. Involuntary muscle spasm, I swear... ^.^

OMG xsilvan  and candy_remix  are at the blaqk audio concert by now. SO JEALOUS. You bitches better have fun and dance like crazies for me!

Does this entry have an end? Of course not! I'm procrastinating doing my latin and greek homework. Buuuut... I really should get to work. So I'll try and wrap it up. We hung out with Edward yesterday, and that was really really awesome, plus he's going to come by our place for dinner sometime. The poor boy was planning on living off of microwave dinners all year, so we will cook for him sometimes. And then today I talked to Phil for the first time since being back, and I should see him sometime this week, yey!

Okay, now I'm almost at the end. Remember my old friends the word count posts? You thought you'd escaped those? Fuck no!
Saturday: 886 words, and the novel hit 90 pages.
Sunday: none =( but it was a good day anyways.
Monday: 146 words plus mulling over the plot. Which is still progress, albeit slightly intangible.
The novel is thereby officially at 26.7%

And you'd all thought I'd forgotten about it... Pah! I ALWAYS give up on projects. Every once and a while I've got to do something unpredictable, so this time I'm sticking with it to the bitter end.

(Badass clouds are definitely winning, fyi, though at the moment holding off from actually raining anymore.)

I'll end this entry with a quote from the drunken boy Steph and I passed on the way home from thecityssummer  et al.'s house last Friday, when we were carrying our door mirrors back. Cause it wins almost as hard as the shirtless boys sitting in the back of their white pickup singing Backstreet Boys that we passed the next day in the UW plaza parking lot. I mean, nothing can win quite as much as that. But drunken boy came close.

"Hey bayBEE! ... hey baaaaybay... watcha got there? Is it a storyboard?"