That was interesting.

In my dream last night, I looked up an unfamiliar word in the dictionary, and the definition therein turned out to be the actual definition of the word.

I'm fascinated by this because I didn't know the word at all until I discovered the information, at which point I was flooded with understanding. But clearly I already knew it, because the only resource I used was my own brain. I literally opened a book inside my head that contained things I know but have forgotten. It makes me wonder what else I know that I don't know that I know.

PS the word was "prosody."

It's why my speaking English is so good.

Why not? Filched from Annika.

I'll do a modified rules version:
1. Bold what you've read
2. Italicize what you plan on reading.

If you see an entry that's neither, feel free to tell me why I should read it.

This Particular List Of Books

1. Pride And Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord Of The Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
4. The Harry Potter Series - J.K. Rowling
5. To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible - Anonymous (I had a book of Bible stories for children when I was younger, and I've used it to look up answers to crossword puzzles, but that's about it.)
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë (Then I can have a discussion on whether it sucks or not!)
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
12. Tess Of The D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (On the shelf.)
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (Lost to the Book Holocaust.)
14. The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare (Yay! Task complete.)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. The Catcher In The Rye - J.D. Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens (I have the Complete Works of Dickens, so I plan to read them all at one point.)
24. War And Peace - Leo Tolstoy (I want to buy it, but I'm abysmally poor right now.)
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime And Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes Of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice In Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind In The Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. The Chronicles Of Narnia - C.S. Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs Of A Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie The Pooh - A.A. Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell (I didn't try to read this, but I tried to try.)
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years Of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer For Owen Meaney - John Irving (On the shelf. Might as well.)
45. The Woman In White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne Of Green Gables - Lucy Maud Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy (Caz says it's good.)
48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord Of The Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life Of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert (Kirk says it's good.)
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense And Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow Of The Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
59. The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice And Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count Of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude The Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children - Sir Salman Rushdie (I did read The Satanic Verses, though.)
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville (I also want to read Billy Budd. Shout out to Mr. Holtzman!)
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows And Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Émile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (I love this freaking book.)
80. Possession - A.S. Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains Of The Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart Of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (Lost in the Book Holocaust.)
92. The Little Prince – Antoine de St. Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy Of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (I can't bitch about the movie until I've read the book. Probably.)
100. Les Misérables – Victor Hugo


Yes, I corrected the list for capitalization, completeness, and uniformity of style.

I am made of science!

Well, sort of.

You may recall some time ago I told you about my harrowing involvement with the Genographic Project and the rage that ensued. To update you on that, a few weeks after all the kerfuffle, I received a rather unceremonious email telling me that my order was being shipped. !!!!

What the hell my friends!

Anyway, I received my kit of science! I swabbed the insides of my cheeks. I plungered the implements into little fluid-filled vials. I packed them and shipped them off. It was very AP Bio. Except for the mailing. And I didn't get to see my cells at 250X magnification afterwards.

Then ... I waited! And I waited. And I waited some more! What would my results be? What! My mother's mother's mothers have lived in the Western Hemisphere for many generations. We are generally known to be of Dutch stock, but who knows? Perhaps I am Lene Lanape! Perhaps I am Inuit.

Um. I'm not. In fact, far from it. I am a member of the super pedestrian and half-inclusive Haplogroup H! We make up half of Europe!

OMG you guys we are all probably cousins you guys OMG.

My mtDNA differs from the Cambridge Reference Sequence in only one position! I'm almost scientifically famous!

Like a dutiful nerdful member of society, I have submitted to include my data in the published study. One tiny datum, doing my part. In addition, I have been offered a chance to have the free services of Family Tree DNA the premier ... something or other, I'm not really sure. I'm going to discuss it with my mother and sister (who, sharing my genetic matter, share in my test results) and see what they would like to do before submitting my information. I mean, I'm not really that fond of most of my family. I don't know that I'd like to know any more of them.

It would be nice if the results had told me which of Haplogroup H's 32 subclades I belong to. As is, the results are a bit bland (my foremothers came from Western Europe!), and, to be honest, a bit of a let down after all the hassle.

This blog is about Harry Potter.

Or: Ack! What did I do?

I just wanted to let you know that the last Harry Potter book is going to be released relatively soon? And I'm kind of excited about it? Also, don't mind the fact that it looks crappy, because hopefully my whole blog will look all different soon anyway.

"Soon" in this instance, can mean whatever you want it to mean. But, we'll see.

Let's neologize!

Thanks to the ever hinglostic Mr. P. Shift Two, I am reminded that I haven't been making enough stuff up lately.

That gets amended today. Today I will tell you about some words that you didn't realize were missing from your life. You didn't realize because I just made them up last night before I went to bed. But they are necessary. You'll see.

We should have a collective neologizing time period. Like, Month. Or a Week. A month is probably better, since everyone has babies and things now. Two and a half months? Variable Period of Time.

There are many acceptable ways to go about making up new vocabulary words. For starters, you could smash together components of another language. Latin is always good for this. It's like instant legitimacy!! Or, you could pull something out of the air. Whatever you think sounds nice or evocative. Just be mindful that this has the pitfall of your new word potentially winding up meaning "cat barf" in Yiddish or something. Every day is an adventure.

Likewise, you can come up with the word first, and then search for its definition, or you could come up with a concept that really needs to be pared down into one word, and make that word for it.

I do both.

escaberel. (n) 1. an item or activity of little function or merit that nevertheless provides a benign fascination.

For example, an escaberel can be an online quiz, writing haikus, or some novelty item that blinks that you can't stop giggling at. So shiny! It's not quite a hobby, not quite an addiction, not quite something you only do when you're supposed to be doing something else. Not to be confused with something that enthralls and is harmful, like, say, The Drugs.


redisenective attraction (n) 1. the condition of being attracted to a younger incarnation (as in a photograph) of someone your own age or older. 2. an infatuation carried over from youth of a person who has since aged.

In other words, redisenective attractive is the reason you still think Wesley Crusher is hot even though you are now in your twenties. Or the reason you have a crush on Cary Grant even though in reality he's older than your grandfather. And dead. Or the reason you can flip through your middle school yearbook and still find that one 8th grader totally dreamy, even though from your current standpoint that would be a felony. Because they're really older than you are, really. So it's weird.


My goal is that eventually my blog will be only the twelfth entry on Google.

That's it, I'm going to have to learn Ukrainian.

Right after I attain fluency in Classical Latin and Irish Gaeilge, and learn passably conversational French and Italian and maybe Welsh.

Seriously, if I could be granted a super power, it would  be to be fluent in all languages. Or not even to speak them, just to be able to understand them. Like, if I could stick some dough in my ears and be able to understand Turkish, that would rock so hard.

Only geniuses will get all 30.

The New York Times Magazine can be kind of dicky, sometimes.

In other news, Birthday: had. It was pretty great.

Donuts, I got ... Hey I know you!

So, back in the day when I thought I was going to be an Ivy-Leaguer, I went through some complicated application processes. Swanky schools like you to meet with alumni of distinction, and then have those alumni report back to them and tattle on you.

For Princeton, my father figured it would be in my favor to meet with someone he knew. (But he apparently didn't think it would be in my favor to, you know, save any money for me. Whoops! Still bitter I guess.)

So one fall evening I trekked into Newark, into the area where they have all the Neo Classical buildings so it doesn't really look so bad (as Newark tends to do). After a pass through some metal detectors I went up some swanky elevators to the swanky office of my father's old crony (I mean, "business associate"). That gentleman? Judge Samuel A. Alito.

Seriously guys? He's pretty nice. And his voting record is clearly pro-me, so I think that's all we need to know. Right?

But what I really want to do...

I recently sent in a headshot to a theatre that was doing a run of classic Greek/Roman plays. I'm into that sort of thing. Last week, I got a call from this place, and the message said that they wanted to "give me the opportunity" to work on one of these shows. Like, directing maybe. I called them back and confirmed that they had called the right number.

So today, I went into the city for a sit-down type thing. Turns out the artistic director of this off-off-Broadway theatre is all into helping artists make art, and stuff like that. And for whatever reason, she would like to help me make some art. So they want me to direct something. "Has Amy ever directed anything before?" you ask yourself. Um. Not as such, no. Which they seem to be aware of, which is why this would only be a 10-15 minute piece I'd be doing. No more than 30 minutes. They'll call me back on Monday to see what's brewing.

This would take place during the summer, so I think and I think you know that I'm not counting on the series. But they could still call! I don't know! Meh.

I'd be casting and committing, and publicizing. There is no audience unless you generate an audience. Also, apparently as long as I'm working hard and expanding my mind, it might not even have to be any good! The girl who interviewed me said that all actors should be made to direct something. Then they wouldn't be such bitches? Maybe!

I am very excited and confused and nervous and incredulous.

Also - tomorrow I graduate! Holy crap, that came up fast! I haven't even had the chance to break in my shoes. They are black heels. I wore them while I was ironing. Hot, eh? "Hasn't Amy already graduated?" you're probably asking. Yes. Last year. But the ol' Alma Mater only has one graduation walk a year, and I could not be included in last year's. Even though I've really had no interest in this, it will mean a lot to my parents to get to see me do this queer ceremony. All I hope is that there are decent pictures. The robe cost 50 bucks!

Holy shit!

Sorry! Still not about that other thing. The Holy Shit! would be much bigger. But interesting shit keeps happening!

I was watching Darkness Falls on FX. Then I watched a few more minutes of it, because FX also does that thing where they show it twice in a row. Emma Caulfield was supposed to be 22, eh? And the girl who played her younger self, is that the girl who was later in A Series Of Unfortunate Events? I believe it is. Then I flipped over to the TV Guide Channel.

Holy Shit! I know this guy! He was being interviewed, because apparently, he is on Guiding Light. Holy shit!

I went to school with him. Sort of. He was a year ahead of me and in Mason Gross. I've met him a total of three times, and I would be utterly shocked if he recognized my name or face. And ... he's on the Guiding Light!

I was totally shocked, but at the same time, I was not at all shocked. Because this man? Is awesome. Seriously. He was, I think unquestionabley, the best actor at Rutgers the entire time I was there. I had more than a small crush on him. He's just ... gah. I sound like Annie. Anyway. He really deserves this, because he's great. I can't even describe.

Wait, yes I can! This is a short paper I wrote for my last acting class. We had to see all the school's productions and pick one actor from each and discuss their performance. For Two Gentlemen of Verona, I choose Mr. Pelphrey. He was Proteus. I toned down my praise, actually, because both of my teachers were in the show with him, so, I didn't want to make it too awkward, you know?

----
February 5, 2004

In this production, I was most particularly impressed with Thomas Pelphrey. I tend to hold Shakespeare productions to a slightly different standard than "normal" shows, and I really appreciated his performance. He kept his line delivery at a moderate, conversational pace, and it felt like every word was imbued with meaning. He was always clear about what he wanted, and always clear about what he was saying, and what the words that he was using meant to him. I felt he was one of the best in the ensemble at handling the dialogue (other favorites include Heather Kendzierski and Raymond McAnally). I also thought that he was one of the best at keeping up the dialect. It occurred to me during the show that the setting used for the play, 1950s Italy, very much lent itself to the type of poetic and metaphorical dialogue that Shakespeare used. I felt that this was highlighted by his delivery, that he really made it seem both possible and plausible that this character, in that time period, could be using those words. While I liked all the performances, I sometimes got the impression that the two "worlds" weren't meshing as easily for some of the actors; sometimes they were being Italian, and sometimes they were being Shakespearean. He seemed to make everything a believable extension of his character.

I was most impressed with the obvious character work on his part. I've seen him in other shows, and in every one I've seen him play completely unique and different characters. He seemed to embody the role. The mannerisms and even the body movement of the character seemed like it was unconscious and naturally done. If I hadn't already seen him use wholly different movements just as naturally for other characters, I might have assumed that he was cast because his personality fit the part.

I also liked the way he focused on the people he was acting with. His attention to his partner was very evident in his face, and you could tell that he was listening and absorbing what they were giving him. He kept good eye contact. There were some moments that I liked in the final scene, in particular his reactiong to Julia identifying herself and Valentine's denunciation of him. In the latter, I felt a very powerful reaction from him, and when he asks for forgiveness, it seemed to me to be a genuine moment from an honest place. Because of his clearness, he did a good job to make his character understandable in his desires, and as sympathetic as possible at the end. This is particularly a feat in my opinion because his character was largely unlikable and his storyline resolved in a conveniently swift and not very believable manner. The playwright was cleary a hack.
----

A+! Also, Tom Pelphrey helped me realize that the acting training at Rutgers is mostly bull crap. Because he went in great. That's why, even though BFAs aren't typically cast in shows, he was in starring roles as a sophomore. He was great before they got their hands on him, and managed to still be great after they were done with him. Rutgers did not do that. Just so you know.

My mother said that she supposed I'll have to start watching Guiding Light now. MAYBE I WILL!

What does this mean?

15% scored higher,
1% scored the same, and
85% scored lower.




I must protest that this quiz is highly biased towards science. Also, the site design and award graphic are ... less than satisfactory. Ha! Put that in your nerd pipe and not know what to do about it!