Evil Wrapped in a Fangirl Disguise

I went to church with Grandma this morning. First time I'd been since, hmm, Christmas I suppose. It wasn't too bad, but there seemed to be some weird undercurrent going on. Or maybe I'm just bored and looking for subtext where there's only text. The priest at my home parish is fairly regularly late to mass, but today he was, according to some people's watches (not mine), on time. Grandma turned to me before hand and said something amounting to, "I guess someone called him on it." Maybe that put ideas in my head. But then the deacon gave his sermon and midway through said something about, "No offense to Father." Either I missed something, or there's been more tension than usual at our rinky-dinky church. It's quite possible I missed something though, I kind of zoned out at one point. Shame on me.

Mostly I went because I feel guilty not going when I'm at home. And I won't be around next week.

Anyway, after mass I talked to a few people. Twice people mentioned how wonderful they've heard my writing is and asked when am I going to be published. Before mass Neesha's grandma asked me the same thing and reminded me that when it happens she gets a first edition signed copy.

And all I could think was, wow, I'm going to disappoint all of you.

And then I was a bit depressed.

So we came home and I finished reading Jasper Fforde's The Big Over Easy: A Nursery Crime. It was fun and enjoyable in the way that all of Fforde's writing has been so far. (I still highly recommend his Thursday Next series. Especially if you're into literature.) It was slow reading for me, though. I don't know if that was because of a fault on the writing's part, or just me having trouble focusing on anything. I think mostly it's the latter. There was some strange word-thing going on at the beginning of the final chapter, and either it was an editing/publishing error, or Fforde just didn't explain it. Sometimes you can't tell with his stuff.

I think I'm going to finish reading Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters. It was the final novel assigned in Ethnic American Literature and as I already had the focus of my final paper, I let it fall behind.

Amazon.com is my friend. The other day I ordered, among other things, Sports Night. Because I need to see the rest of it! And because I love every character. And it's great. I'm excited to get it.

I'm going to Seattle on June 28 to return on July 5. Mom and I will be house- and dog-sitting. Sometime during that period we're going to kidnap pick up Natasha at SU and go apartment supply shopping. Mom says it's also highly likely that we can see Superman Returns as well. Now if only I was in the Seattle area for Pirates of the Caribbean as well. I've got the theme music stuck in my head already. And every time a preview comes on I'm like, "OMG Norrington!" and Mom goes, "Where? Where?" So I pointed out his arm. And then I showed her pictures and she went, "ooh."

And, wow, the week after that's out, SGA and SG-1 come back. The beginning of July is going to be good.

When e-mailing professors I am finding it increasingly difficult not to pepper my messages with smiley, or frowny, faces and action indicators (or whatever they're called). Only a few minutes ago, I wanted to put ::blush:: in a message. And, well, this is not academic and would be very weird.

Wonder what the professors would do?

*

I have the sinking suspicion that I am the worst English Major *ever*. Didn't go to class today. Feeling yucky. Doubt I missed anything though.

However, in Philosophy Dr. Berry awarded me the participation award for the day. I win! Not that it's an actual award, but yea! I got kind of excited and talkative during the seminar session concerning Foucault while she was working with our group. I was insightful. Go me. (I feel like I'm twelve when I get excited over professors' praise. I like being told that I'm doing just fine. Apparently when I was in kindergarten I used to go up to my teacher to make sure I was coloring properly.)

The second half of today's class was seminar discussion on Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite. Very interesting reading. Camille (Herculine/Alexina/Abel) was raised as a girl until the age of 21 when she challenged her sex. At which point she was declared a man. He lived until the age of 29/30, at which point he committed suicide. The memoirs were written around the age of 25.

I found that though I enjoyed the reading, and found the author interesting and intriguing, I couldn't like her. However, once she became he, I found I liked him much more. Mostly this had to do with the voice, the style of writing. The whole first half of the reading there were an amazing amount of exclamation points! (It is raining today! The sky is gray! I skipped class! This makes me feel guilty even though I feel like crap! ! !) And then I realized *why* it bothered me. It reads like the diary of a 13 year old girl. (Like the ones you find on-line where nothing is spelled or capitalized correctly and the grammar is so scary you fear for the fate of the UNIVERSE.) But there is a point where that all changes and at that point, I found I enjoyed the voice and really felt for him.

It's a book written by a 25 year old man about his experiences as a 13 year old girl. Fascinating stuff. Next we read Foucault's History of Sexuality.

*

I keep filling up my MP3 player. There's room now, but I've already got things I want to put on it and little else I want to take off. With my CD habits I should have realized I'd have this problem. What's a girl to do?

Tom passed out from heat exhaustion today. I guess he was getting out of the truck, stood for a couple of seconds, and was down.

This heat really just kind of snuck up on us all the last couple of days. And us without AC. Woe. At least I can randomly go run through the sprinklers. An activity that will always be fun. They need big sprinklers on campus for students to run through. There's the fountain in the quad, which must be meant to taunt us.

And then there are those funny Seattle days where the sun shines bright so you dress to be cool. And then you get outside and it's really only 50 degrees. Honestly? I kinda miss those. I'd much rather be too cold than too hot. When you're too cold there are usually ways to warm back up. It's much harder to cool yourself off.

*

Finished reading Diary by Chuck Palahniuk. Oh my god. Brilliant. I'm completely in love with his writing style. ( A couple of my favorite lines/parts: )

I had no idea where he was going to go with the plot, and I'm so grateful for that. I love a book that can surprise me 'til the end. Bought Lullaby at Barnes & Noble, so will have to start that soon. 'Cause Mom's hijacked HBP. I've told her that she's not allowed to mention HP at all. Ever. It's forbidden. She's resorted to, "Yeah, I was reading today and so-and-so said something to so-and-so and I couldn't believe it!" She mocks me.

Other than that, I'm *so* friggin' bored. I want to be back in Seattle with stuff to do and people to see. I miss people. :( Out here in the boonies. With the coyotes. And the huge corn field right outside. With the crop circles. With the children of the corn. With my over-active imagination.

Also, this song cracks me up like nothing else. "Someone left the cake out in the rain / and I don't think that I can take it / 'cause it took so long to back it / and I'll never have that recipe again! Oh no!!"

I don't have anything really worth saying. Am actually feeling useless and uninteresting. I think I'm just tired. *yawn*

Today was Tom's first day of high school. Scary. My little brother is a ninth grader! And Mr. Arlt is gone. *shocked* I'm glad I finished before he left. Science would not have been the same without him. And Tom did not get the Evil Dark Lord for Algebra. Oh well.

( Score! )

Oh, actually there is something I can ramble about. I started reading Prey by Michael Crichton last night. It is about nanotechnology. The inside flap of the jacket says, "In the Nevada desert, an experiment has gone horribly wrong. A cloud of nanoparticles--micro-robots--has escaped from the laboratory. This cloud is self-sustaining and self-reproducing. It is intelligent and learns from experience. For all practical purposes, it is alive."

That creeps me out.

Now, Crichton is an extremely intelligent man. He knows a lot of stuff. All of his books are based on some fact somewhere, some truth. In his introduction he says that "[nanotechnology] is the quest to build man-made machinery of extremely small size, on the order of 100 nanometers, or a hundred billionths of a meter. Such machines would be about 1,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair." His introduction to the book also explains some of the origins of nanotechnology and where it is going/expected to go in the future. The goal is to design organisms that will, for all intents and purposes, be "alive". They will be called artificial because they are man-made.

I have one thought on this. Just because we have the power to do something does not mean it is a good idea. Producing artificial organisms that can take care of themselves, learn from their past actions, self-reproduce, and generally make "conscious" decisions is a bad idea. In theory maybe it isn't. In theory it's probably a darn good idea. But a lot of things look good "in theory". (The design of the Titanic was darn good in theory.) But if we give machines the power to really decide things than we open up the possibility of not being able to control those decisions. And then we have a bunch of amazingly microscopic machines to worry about. The power to do something does not mean we should do it.

I'm a little past page 120 and there are 364 pages in the book. So far nothing has really been explained. Hopefully something will be explained soon. I want to know what in tarnation is going on!