lunabee34

1. I had my interview for promotion to full professor yesterday. I feel really good about my application. Obviously, nothing is certain, but I am not anxious about it at all. Now to wait until April. :)

2. I listened to this NPR interview with Rhiannon Giddens about turning her ballad "Build a House" into a children's book, and you should, too. You should also listen to the song. It's an unflinching look at the African American experience, beginning with slavery, that highlights black resiliency and strength.

3. You should also watch the music video for Harry Styles's Music for a Sushi Restaurant. Holy shit is this a bit of homoerotic, monsterfucking gloriousness. Thanks to nyctanthes for the heads up.

4. You should read Experimental Protocol by anagrrl. It's a Rodney-centric AU of the SGA episode "Mortal Coil" that is full of the kind of creeping dread that's perfect for a Halloween read.

5. If you'd rather spend Halloween giggling, check out this political attack ad we received in the mail. I don't think it had the desired effect. I would love to live on planet Stacey. *g*

1. Josh has tested positive for COVID. ( discussion of COVID )

2. I am just completely speechless about what happened yesterday at the Capitol. ( and yet I continue to speak )

3. But some rays of light in the darkness! My state elected the two Democratic Senators that will allow us to start fixing the mess Trump made! And I was a part of it! Living in the South, I have always felt like my vote doesn't matter for anything beyond local matters (I still vote, of course), so this was completely novel and energizing and exciting for my votes for Biden, Warnock, and Ossoff to be so important. And it was doubly exciting for such a historic vote to be Emma's first time at the polls.

I got a Christmas card from stonepicknicking_okapi with a gorgeous cross stitch of my name and a bee and a moon inside. It was really touching to get such a kind gesture on such a shitty day.

1. I just got a totally unexpected card from my parents with a check for huge sum of money. Dad gave my brother his old Easy Go golf cart, bought himself a new one, and sent us a check for what he estimates to be the price of the old one he gave my brother. I am utterly floored. So generous and amazing. We spent a large chunk of our savings on the new car after the accident with the bear, and I am starting to get the bills for all the bloodwork I had done. I just got the EOB for the bloodwork the rheumatologist did in the spring; it was sent to this special lab out in Arizona, which is obviously out of network LOL, and so looks like I'm going to be on the hook for $1500 worth of labs just for that visit alone, not to mention all the doc visits + labs this fall figuring out the mono. So this is timely and deeply appreciated.

2. GA is going blue!!!!!! Even if in the end the state still goes for Trump, I am feeling heartened that it is so close. Things are changing in this state, and that is powerful.

( cut for spoilers for latest SPN episode )


4.

Good Bones and Simple Murders by Margaret Atwood

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is my favorite Atwood short story collection (so far; I still have a couple of the most recent ones to read). It contains my two favorite short stories of hers--"Happy Endings" and "There Was Once." These are both excellent to teach; students respond really well to them.

She's so funny. The epigraph for "The Female Body" makes clear that someone has written about her work in an academic journal, saying that she's written extensively on the topic of the female body. The story begins: "I get up in the morning. My topic feels like hell." Maybe it won't translate as funny in this review, but I genuinely LOLed when I read that line.

Love these lines from "Homelanding" which remind me so much of Vandermeer's Southern Reach Trilogy: "teeth, by means of which I destroy and assimilate certain parts of my surroundings and change them into my self." (space between my and self is deliberate and lovely)

Highly recommended.



View all my reviews

1. I'm struggling to find anything meaningful to say about what's going on in the U.S. right now. I can't find the words, but my heart is full. I think there's going to be a protest march in my tiny town, so I'll report back later about that.

2. I got an early birthday gift from misbegotten --a mug covered with Shakespearean insults and Margaret Atwood's Hagseed! Yay! Thank you, my friend. <3

3. I've been doing some dance workout videos on the Madfit Youtube channel and really liking them. They're a seriously good workout.

4. I got to have a socially distanced yard visit with a friend yesterday! Yay!

5. Go read sholio's as the war machine keeps turning.
Stranger Things; Billy and Max gen
What an amazing apocalypse AU. Wow. This is seriously good reads.

I early voted today for Stacey Abrams.

I have never been nervous voting ever, but I was nervous today because my address on my driver's license and the address on my voter registration card don't match. When we moved, I updated my voter registration, but my driver's license doesn't expire until 2021, so I didn't want to pay to get another one. The whole reason I voted early instead of waiting for Election Day is that I was worried I'd get to the poll and be rejected because they're not an exact match. If it was going to be a problem, I wanted time to deal with it.

But fortunately, I was able to vote and nobody blinked an eye. I was still so anxious, though; like I double-checked my license every time I had to sign anything to be sure my signature was matching the one on my license (I had to go two places to vote: one place for local city elections and another for state/county elections).

1. I forgot to post that we had watched Atomic Blonde last December. It is a beautiful movie (such fashion, such arresting images), the protagonist is named Lorraine (best name ever, yes?), and the use of music is phenomenal. I loved ( spoiler ), and I really liked the supporting cast. Overall, the level of violence was a bit much for me. I mostly enjoyed watching it, but I doubt I'll ever watch it again.

2. Emma and I watched that 2016 World of Warcraft movie a couple of days ago. It was a deeply poor life decision, my friends. I genuinely thought it would be Sci-Fi Channel movie levels of amusing. It is not. It is not, not, not. What is young!Howard Stark even doing in this movie? Can he have already squandered his Captain America and Peggy Carter TV show earnings? The absolute best part of this movie is how cute the CGI orc baby is; he chews on his mom's dreadlocks and coos and growls at the camera. This is bottom of the barrel stuff, y'all.

3. Somebody posted a thread on meme asking why conservative people like sci-fi, specifically Star Trek. I didn't participate in the thread because I wanted to post about it here.

My conservative, evangelical parents are enormous sci-fi fans, especially of Star Trek. They've seen every major sci-fi movie and TV show since before I was born. They dig it.

And yet, they wouldn't want to live in the universe that Star Trek portrays. My parents are so into American nationalism and exceptionalism (as well as believing that a global government is the precursor to Armageddon; for a long time they were truly afraid that the European Union and a shared currency, etc., was about to usher in the end of the world) that the idea of Earth as one entity is something they could never accept. A world without money where everyone's survival needs are met? A world of religious and cultural tolerance where people of different races happily coexist (or at least they are supposed to in the Platonic ideal)? A world where sexism is supposedly eradicated?

I don't know if it's that my parents don't think that deeply about what entertains them; that's certainly possible. If you're not going to write an essay about what you've just watched or write a story about it or even have a deep conversation with someone about it afterwards, maybe the implications just pass you by. But Star Trek is kinda anvilicious with its hopes for the future. So IDK. Is it just this bizarre cognitive dissonance where they can enjoy a fictional universe without realizing that their beliefs and political leanings would preclude the development of such a universe? I have no answer, but it's a really interesting question. Anybody else notice something like this with people you know?

1. I called all my CongressPeople and asked them to oppose Steve Bannon's appointment as President-elect Trump's chief strategist. It took less than five minutes to make all three calls which were each answered after the first ring. All three are Republicans, so who knows what effect, if any, my calls will have.

2. Reviews of the last two weeks of The Walking Dead: ( SPOILERS )

3. We saw Doctor Strange. ( SPOILERS )

I VOTED, AND I'M WITH HER!






Now if my nerves can just hold out until the results are in.

1. I've been thinking about writing an essay about why I think evangelical Christians are so willing to vote for Trump. I was raised in that tradition (Southern Baptist), and it makes no sense on the surface why people who not only say they are Christian but who claim to make every decision in their lives based on that Christianity would support Trump, but having been a part of that culture for the first 18 years of my life, I have some ideas about why they're doing so. But I've also been thinking that plenty of other people have written about this, and I don't know that I have anything new to say or offer about the subject, so. IDK

2. We finished our rewatch of Treme. One half of the couple we watched it with used to live in Louisiana and is an accomplished musician who often played gigs in NOLA. So that added an extra layer of fun to the rewatch; they'd often comment about places featured, or he'd have stories about the musicians in the episodes. ( SPOILERS )

3. We are almost done with Downton Abbey season two. We finished all the regular episodes and only have the Christmas Special left to watch.

( SPOILERS )

I can't wait to see where the story goes. I am actually sad that Walking Dead is resuming because it means no more Downton Abbey for awhile.

4. executrix sent me a biography of Jane Austen (Jane Austen: A Life by Claire Tomalin) which was really interesting. I knew nothing about her life, so everything was pretty much new to me. This is a very thorough, heavily researched book which I would recommend to anyone interested in her. I have to admit that from time to time I got a little confused because the cast of characters, so to speak, is so large and so many people in her family and life shared names; I just wanted to read it for entertainment and not take notes or anything, but reading it that way did mean that I was a little bit lost from time to time.

I have two main takeaways from the book. First, how horrible that so many of her letters and documents were destroyed. I wonder if they were truly scandalous (I doubt it), or if that notion of privacy (that regardless of their content, the public at large shouldn't be able to read her letters and that wanting to do so was born of prurient interest) which was beginning already to erode with the explosion of celebrity culture and mass media was largely responsible.

Second, I wonder if she was happy to stay single or if she considered her life tragic. The book posits that her first, truncated romance with Tom Lefroy was very dear to her and that she was very hung up on him and hurt when he was essentially forbidden to see her. Tomalin offers some evidence that Austen was thinking about him three years after that romance had ended. It also mentions that she initially accepted and then turned down a proposal from a man she was friends with but had no romantic feelings for. My take on it is that she'd watched all the women around her have ungodly amounts of children and a number of them die in childbirth and maybe she was grateful to escape that horror. IDK I mean, it can certainly be both. What do y'all think (about anything relating to her life)?

1. Thanks for your well wishes, everyone. The procedure went fine, even if I still feel like I'm recovering from strep throat. LOL In a completely shocking turn of events, the doc saw no sign of celiac during the visual examination of my stomach; he's sending the biopsies off for further examination, but usually celiac damage is visible to the eye. So, I might not have celiac after all.

2. I am living in Bizarro State. After Governor Deal vetoed Georgia's version of the Religious Liberties Bill, we were all certain that he would sign the Campus Carry Bill into law. This would have been the most permissive campus carry law in the country. Somewhere between 6-8 other states have campus carry laws in place but they are very restrictive (you can't have them in the dorms or professor's offices or at sporting events or in daycares and a handful of other places). The Georgia law would have allowed concealed weapons on every part of all the USG campuses except dorms (which we all know is bullshit; on a residential campus, the students would have to bring the guns into the dorm; if they left them in their cars, cars would be broken into every five minutes and guns stolen). The only ray of light was that you have to be 21 to carry a concealed weapon, meaning that the majority of our students would not have been old enough to obtain a permit. Well, lo and behold, Governor Deal vetoed this bill, too, and wrote a lengthy and wonderful explanation of his decision that includes quotations from the Founding Fathers about why guns don't belong at schools. I am delightedly shocked. Naturally, as soon as he vetoed the bill, someone introduced another bill to permit tasers to be carried on campus. *headdesk*

3. I am really enjoying Gotham this season. ( SPOILERS )

4. Wow am I bored with Castle. I think I'll actually truly watch next week's episode with my whole attention rather than reading fanfic and occasionally glancing up as I've been doing this semester since it will be Beckett's last, but on the whole, I am not interested in this show anymore.

5. ( SPOILERS FOR GAME OF THRONES )

6. ( SPOILERS FOR PENNY DREADFUL )