The Tomboy in Heels

So I have a television confession to make. I'm pretty well-known in my family for literary sacrileges like announcing at the dinner table that "I don't like Steinbeck" or "I just don't think Huck Finn is especially well-written," but I don't usually horrify and offend everyone with my taste in movies, music or television. It was only a matter of time. There is clearly also now something wrong with my taste in serialized science fiction.

I just can't get that into Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I know, I know. What is WRONG with me?

I want to like this show. I really do. First of all, it is one of the iconic geek shows of our time, a cultural touchstone for my own subculture that is practically necessary for participation in the herd. I'm the tail end of the Star Trek Next Generation generation. For anyone younger than me, it's Buffy up until you get to people as young as my students. For another, as interested as I am in representations of gender and sexual orientation, I should like this show, right? It's ground breaking and empowering and gutsy. And yet...after watching the first two seasons I'm unattached. It's a cool conceit - casting the ditz in the heroine role - and one that plays into the kind of valuing-women-while-not-further-devaluing-the-feminine statement that I like. But for all the innovation in gender, the teenagers are still rather cardboard as teenagers. Maybe I'm just too old for this show? I mean, I do find myself bizarrely put off by all the scenes that take place in that weird warehouse/fast food joint that totally has the vibe of a bar, but maybe doesn't actually serve alcohol and even if it doesn't it's a total meat market and WHERE THE HELL ARE THESE KIDS' PARENTS?! Maybe I'm just out of touch, but these teenagers don't sound or live anything like teenagers I knew (and I am not actually THAT old, people) and I like a few nods to reality in my science fiction. I've caught random episodes from later, and I've heard that we get more good subversiveness re:sex and gender, but I haven't seen a solution to the whole "secret of lives of brats" issue...

So am I tasteless? Have I not given it the time it deserves? Does it come into its own in the third season? Am I immune to the subliminal awesome vibes because I am the only person ever who is not attracted to any of Angel/Buffy/Xander/Willow? Do you want to kick me out of nerd-dom forever and always? Something else?

Reply to this meme by yelling 'WORDS!', and I will give you five words that remind me of you.
Then post them in your journal and explain what they mean to you.
I got mine from earis

1. Algonquian - Academically, this is supposedly what I do. Of course, in the words of one of my favorite profs in the field "I'm a white linguist. What do I know?" And that's the thing, I care about this, but it isn't mine. Still, language preservation, and especially indigenous language preservation is important to me both intellectually and for some reason that is more ethereal - the very idea of losing your words seems to be such a great social injustice. As an outsider, what can I do? But I want to make myself available to do what I can in the way of documentation and curriculum development for the Mi'kmaw schools if they can use me. That's my MA project at the moment...

2. Cider - There was ALWAYS cider in the house growing up, unless someone forgot to buy it. We got it in giant jugs and it was best in the fall and was never quite as good again after they passed a law about pasteurizing it. Ah well. I suppose we pay this price for safety. :) In the afternoon I drank it cold, with my dad, or with Claire. At night, same people, but we'd heat it up. Before I drank alcohol, cider was the drink my dad would pour me and whatever teenagers the dining room table had collected that day if it seemed like we needed to talk, and also the drink we'd fix ourselves to go with late night movies. Hard cider plays a bigger role now, and I usually drink it with Ben. We crack open a couple bottles of Woodchuck while we're cleaning the house sometimes or with dinner.

3. Snowdays - I always knew about the snowdays before the other kids because the phone would ring at 5 in the morning when the teacher phone chain called my dad. So I'd usually get to sleep in, and then by the time I got up, it was often cleared enough to get to someones house or for people to get to our house. I often spent them with Claire (probably why you gave me the word, really...) and I think that sometimes we did the snowball fight thing, but usually we just holed up and did very little - some catching up on homework and a lot of nothing. It felt wonderful, and like a reprieve, and like catching your breath. And it felt quiet. I miss snowdays and I miss that kind of snow, deep and silent. We haven't gotten much of that for years.

4. Due South - This was probably the first grown up show that I followed not because my parents watched it. I watched it sporadically in its initial run, and found it charming. When I made the discoveries - while home sick with flu in middle school - that it was rerun during the day and that people on the internet were discussing queer subtext, charming went to a whole new level. I'm not an insider in fandom as others are (strange fact, I was actually the one who found the slash on the internet and said "Claire! Look!" and a fannish star was born...) but this show still rocks my slash ship. Because they ride off into the sunset together, and that's CANON. And unlike sometimes where I feel that a slash reading of a show requires you to read characters as "gay for each other" or to really toss over the opposite sex characters (usually the strong women, unfortunately) that they are with, this ship is pretty guilt-free. I can read these guys as queer heroes, and that does rock my world. (Of course, remember, this was the early-mid 90s, so we're stuck with subtext in this era. Captain Jack was nowhere on the scene...)

5. Folk Music - I'll dance to it, sing it, play it. Just let me near it. Of course, I'm not a purist, so my definition of folk music can expand to contain basically any genre that traditional folk music has touched and influenced. I grew up around it. My dad played in a bluegrass band that was very folk influenced and they practiced in our living room. He played traditional songs and ones he wrote all the time. Then I fell in with folkies my own age, got peer pressured into becoming a Morris Dancer and going to contradances, you know ... normal teenage stuff ;) Practically anything on my playlist has a folk influence (unless Dan put it there and it's synth pop... or if it's from the 80s). There's some part of me (maybe the residual medievalist) that wants all my pop culture to harken back, to be connected and stand on the shoulders of what came before, to show that culture is cumulative. Or maybe it's got a good beat and I can dance to it.

Lady Gaga may secretly be a genius.

I cannot get the Rogue Trader's Voodoo Child out of my head. It's good. But THE SOUND OF DRUMS... it's kind of turning into exactly what its reference in Doctor Who refers to. (I should also note that this is not ENTIRELY in my head. It owes much to my husband wandering around singing it all day.)

I hate Power Point.

1980s music should make me nostalgic, or maybe make me feel like a child. Instead it seems to make me feel like a need a stiff drink.

Someone removed the driver side mirror from my car. Not hit, mind you. REMOVED. Smashed the glass quite neatly and then pried the plastic bit off leaving the weird little arm covered in wires sticking out. Fuck them.

Clowns are really scary. Not as scary as monkeys, but really really scary.

Had to get that off my chest. Okay. Feeling better.

In grad school, I have often found that my brain requires (disturbingly long) periods of inactivity in order to gear up for springing into action. It’s like letting dough “relax” before forming it into loaves. Except with me some times you get loaves - or academic papers- and sometimes you get short stories or songs of questionable musical merit or blog posts of dubious entertainment value. So the dough might be relaxing before being baked, or it might be relaxing before turning into The Blob and eating women who vacuum in high heels. You never know. So what does brain dough do while it relaxes? It tends to watch DVDs and read books. It’s opinionated. And it has recommendations.

( “Cracker”Collapse )

( “Labyrinth”Collapse )

( “ThursdayCollapse )

( “NorthernCollapse )

( “SlingsCollapse )

( “Possession”Collapse )

no. not the computer, me.

A nerve running down the outside of my right arm is pinched and unhappy. So typing is painful, knitting is out of the question. Playing the clarinet is unthinkable. Morris dancing basically feels like someone is driving a spike into the base of my hand when I do stick dances. This has been going on for months. Hence, no lj posts.

First they thought it was carpal tunnel, and told me to take it easy. Then it was an ergonomic problem and I got stuck in a brace.

Then I said fuck it and started painting the kitchen cabinets. Then I regretted it.

Then it was pins and needles half the time. Then it was always cold.

Then one of my office mates said, "Sarah, I think your arm is just possessed by demons."

Now I am at the fuck it point again and I am typing, while having pins and needles and planning on going to paint more kitchen cabinets. If anyone knows a good elbow/wrist exorcist, call me. Thanks.

P.S. while I was avoiding the computer, we got a dog. Her name's Mabel. She came from the shelter and she's great, although she's a dingbat. Total dingbat. And she's into feet. Right now she is sleeping with her snout in my sneaker. Dingbat.

walking down Cayuga street drinking a CTB smoothie and holding a bunch of kale from the farmer's market as if it were a bunch of flowers on your way to return an overdue travel book to the TCPL.

a 24 hour grocery store and a mad thought that I may go there at 3 am just to buy scotch tape.

the daily thunderstorm, which arrives promptly at 6 pm most weekdays.

the best damn tofu I've ever eaten, and the idea that maybe offering "we have fantastic tofu!" to Claire as a reason to come to grad school here may have been a non-sequitur. But STILL.

It feels like summer and it smells like fall.

Pudgy college boys with their shirts off are standing on the fraternity porches, talking on cell phones and drinking a beer. Up on south hill the Ithaca College kids are moving in and playing hacky-sack in our parking lot. Someone down the street is teaching violin lessons to a young child with a strong, self-assured tone but no vibrato yet. I'm drinking a mixture of mango, orange juice and pomegratate flavored seltzer water with a shot of gin and watching the neighbor's chihuahua pace nervously around the lawn.

I don't consider myself a nostalgic person, but fall always does strange things to me. It's back to school time in more ways than just the start of classes. It's the right time for a little bit of looking back, if only to stop you from looking forward. Playing the clarinet again contributes to this weird retrograde feeling. My case still has the name plaque permanently glued on it with my old name. I thought about changing it, putting one on with my new name and my shiny Ithaca address. But I know I won't. Sometimes when I'm playing I feel as if I've borrowed the instrument, as if it is her clarinet, who ever she was. (An old music camp friend says he can't get over the feeling that I have killed someone and taken her life.) It's been so long since I played clarinet with any sort of seriousness that it sometimes amazes me that I can still play. I'm so different now that I feel like I should actually have different fingers, different lips by now. But the muscle memory is there, powerful enough to make me question whether I can really have changed as much in other ways as I like to think.

I feel agitated in the fall. It's not that I am unmoored, or ill at ease with the decisions I have made. I've been both those places and this is not them. Life is life as I know it. Life punctuated by classes and rehearsals and the modern trappings of procrastination. It's also life as I got to know it when I was out of school. It's life perpetually out of bread and with too much milk and eggplant to reasonably use before it will go bad. But I feel that there's always a silence to the fall, perhaps an inhale before a particularly long exhale of a played phrase. But it always feels like the conductor waits a little too long to let you let the air out. And I'm right ... there ... right now.

I saw this on Wing's journal a while ago. Now I'm just procrastinating...

( MemeCollapse )

...but I'm not. There's nothing specifically due tomorrow and I should be doing all the things that are due on Tuesday or Wednesday. But that's somehow much harder than it would be to do something that would, hypothetically, be due tomorrow.

I just returned from New Jersey, which was wonderful for reasons that had nothing to do with New Jersey. A bunch of college friends congregated at one couple's apartment and acted beautifully immature and then all slept over. Apparently you really can fit a lot more people on the living room floor of a tiny apartment than you would expect, providing that they are all very good friends. (At two different points during the night I woke to find that my aggressive bed-pig of a boyfriend had shoved a person - once me and once not - over by about two feet from where they had previously been. It never seemed to wake Maryna up, though. Or Nathaniel, who she was rolled into. I am amused. Apparently Ben and I deserve eachother, though. Everyone else I've ever slept next to has complained about my kicking or my theft of the center of the bed...)

It's kind of strange to have it really brought home to me that I am now one of those people who can't give any sort of depth to the answer to "What are you studying? / How's work?" This was brought home to me both at the party and in a phone conversation earlier in the week in which one of my friends tried to explain to me the command structure of the Marines and then asked me for details on what I was doing. He rapidly realised that he didn't want details. I was far more interested in the Marines than he is in syntax.... Similarly, I feel that many of my friends in grad school can far better explain to me what they are studying than I can to them. I at least know SOME physics. The average college student has not, however, taken, say Ling 101. (Okay. Maybe at UMass...) Ah well. I clearly have a fetish for the obscure.

Addition to the last post: Grad school is also kind of like high school. I am playing the E-flat clarinet. I am also morris dancing on a team where my ex-boyfriend is considered some sort of folk-dance rock star. (He is. My taste in men is impeccable. :P)

I have been a grad student for about a week now. I've also had internet access on a regular basis for a few days and I am liking it a lot. I still haven't gotten the hang of the fact that real things actually happen over e-mail and I need to check it often.

SO far, grad school is a little bit like college and a LOT like elementary school. It's like elementary school in that I carry my lunch and walk there or get dropped off when I'm desperate and Ben takes me. And I walk home and it's all uphill. And that I play the clarinet and carry it to school and it feels heavy. And that I leave a lot of my books in my cubby on campus when I don't have homework. And that I live in a house and not in a dorm. And that I eat a lot of peanut butter.

Classes haven't really taken off yet, so I have very little to report on academically.

I guess the most significant thing to report on for the end of the summer is that I took up clarinet again. So I basically un-quit my instrument. I practiced a bit at the end of the summer, and, somewhat miraculously, auditioned and made it into the lower level wind ensemble for Cornell. So Wind Symphony rehearses this afternoon and I'm pretty excited to be playing in a group again. The assistant conductor is a clarinetist and asked me to take lessons from him. I told him that I'd like to do it next semester. I'm not psychologically ready for that. I'm still trying to get past having let it all go. I'm still trying to convince myself that the all-or-nothing approach to music that I'm used to isn't going to come back and bite me in the ass and someone's not going to say, "Just quit again. there's no point doing this FOR FUN as an ADULT."

Does anyone know who wrote the song "I Don't Know Why?" I've heard several versions of it, but they're pretty much always good. "I don't know why the sky is so blue, and I don't know why I'm so in love with you. / But if there were no music, then I would not get through. / I don't know why I know these things, but I do."