La Phalene

So, on Monday I need to hand in a paper on the Green party. I picked an examination of the role of preportionate representation on fringe party power, but I’m not quite sure how to narrow my topic down into something I both have lots of data to cite, and is relavant to my topic. Orgionally I wanted to do a paper on the effect of the international nature of the Green Party on Canadian voter perception, but there’s no data to speak of on the subject.

The topic I chose should be relatively easy, but I can’t find the journal article I need. Unfortunatly proportionate representation is a subject that’s been studied to tiny details, and the search systems seem unable to compensate for the common nature of the key words I want. However, this is not my thesis, it’s a minor paper (even despite it’s meaty length), so I think I can cobble something together with the research I did glean.

Basically the thrust of my paper is that a small, fringe party is screwed in a first past the post system, and inroads by the Greens have usually been fueled by a system that favours actual popularity, not majority-in-riding. Now I just need to put this together in a coherent way by 3 PM Monday.

I get a lot of blog spam. Some of it is the usual ‘Buy V1gra!’ ads with very little attempt hide it’s purpose. Sometimes these are fake friendly comments with links to seedy websites telling me in various degrees of coherent english that it is a “Great post, this person agree at link X”. Sometimes these spam messages have gotten more creative, being made of huge blocks of stolen text interspaced with random medication related links so they resemble some sort of post-modern fiction experiement. Recently, however, the comment spam has all been from one bot trying to push various medicines. Each one lists what the pill does in fairly good english, but includes a great deal of randomness in the “If you have X, don’t use Y” list. He’s the highlights:

*Suicidal or already having a suicide shot at.
*Preggers or trying to be productive
*pregnant or infuriating to get in a family way
*if you have alcohol containing drinks
*pregnant or annoying to regain having a bun in the oven
*Bipolar or having the story bipolar
*Chron’s bug
*irregular heartbeat or heart plague
*sentiment fit out
*ISOTRETINOIN treats glowering acne
*if you commonly swig rot-gut containing drinks
*thyroid muddle
*mental problems, such as depression, psychosis, attempted suicide, or a strain retailing of loony problems
*eye or delusion problems, including a rare inherited vision infirmity called retinitis pigmentosa
*fecund or troublesome to get having a bun in the oven
*bend the elbow more than 3 booze containing drinks a time
*an freakish or allergic reply to ketorolac, aspirin, other NSAIDs, other medicines, foods, dyes, or preservatives
*pregnant or worrying to retrieve significant
*an hooch libel pretty pickle
*downcast stomach acid staging
*pregnant or fatiguing to pick up in the pudding club
*sentiment condition
*mental problems, such as dejection, psychosis, attempted suicide, or a family retailing of off one’s rocker problems

And at the bottom of every list-
*breast feeding

So I bugged my poor father about more cash, which should hit my bank account in the next few days. That’s certainly a relief, as at the moment whenever I opened my wallet I saw a yawning abyss. My mother’s feeling dreadfully guilty about not getting the student loan forms to me with any degree of alacrity. The Machiavellian part of me feels like I should almost cheer her on- every moth she doesn’t manage to cough up is a month that I have to be given interest free cash.

She’s actually actively being nice to my father too, who seems to spend a lot of time denying his squirming guilt. This way he gets to feel magnanimous and well organized- and to be honest either one is very difficult for him.

Despite my protests of sleepiness, the year is purring along quite comfortably. My gentleman might be privately screaming in anxiety over his upcoming thesis deadline, but every time my professors give a midterm outline for their respective classes, my workload decreases to what I’ve already covered and my eyes get a bit less buggy.

Relief about financial concerns means time to get a haircut through the salon that did a very good job last time and tame my eyebrows with judicious application of boiling wax. Being a woman is bloody expensive and involves quite a bit of professional mutilation. To add to it, many of my older bras now have a large hole in the band and this means that I’m going to have to shell out more money on other people’s beauty standards. I really wish that bras were cheaper – I’m very lucky because I’m exactly average in size, so stores usually have my fit in a variety of patterns, but the price point for something that feels comfortable is still about $30, and waiting until the sales can be a hit or miss proposition, since being the most common size all the bland basics and pretties models tend to sell out before then, and you’re left with the enormous taupe monstrosity with the rhinestones, and the acid green starched mesh boudoir bra. Granted I feel even more sorry for the plus sized crowd, to whom those seem to be the starting, full price selection. I remember one time sifting through a bin of thongs, and some sweet and innocent designer decided is what fat women really needed was more leopard print and circus themed underpants.

My brain’s gone back on holiday again, leaving me with a sort of fatty pudding between my ears, that makes terrible, churning squoshy noises when I try to use it. I know so because I sat down to focus on my homework and I read half the chapter only to find out not a single word had actually passed from my eyes to my active memory.

Even as I type this, my eyelids are closing temselves. Napping during homework is not abnormal for me- I seem to run near constant sleep deprivation (I have all the symptoms according to the sleep health chart in the dr’s office, allowing me to over achieve in at least one feild in my life), which sleeping extra doesn’t seem to completely remedy. So far I’ve tried thicker curtains and a sleep mask, though sadly both leak. Perhaps I need a better quality mask, since my cutains only filter 1/4 of the light and my large nose makes the mask jut off my face with a big drafty gap on the bottom. Maybe I should also talk to a doctor about it again… Sadly they don’t really seem to be able to do much but check my thyroid a lot and question my caffiene intake suspiciously.

But anyway, these past few days have been especially bad as far as napping. I’ve conked out three days in a row for two or three hour naps and missed yoga because I’m just too physically and mentally stunned out. And now it’s straight to bed, fo another day of being a zombie. Nrrrrr… Need chronic fatigue treated!

So I went out and bought a big sheet of red paper, the most economical way to cut out 13 paper hearts for the various folk in my building. As of the 14th I’ll either be adored or shunned. I’m hoping for immaturity- most people I know are delighted toget noticed, even trivially. The only thing I worry is that people will take it the wrong way.

That and my neighbour, who I share a bedroom wall with, is borderline homocidal from the loud sex noises. Correction- loud pleading for mercy, hitting -and- sex noises. There’s really no way to flog someone quietly, and I’ll happily listen to her play guitar round the clock is she forgives us for having kinky sex less than a foot away from her bed.

To facilitate better studying, I gave up web surfing. So far it hasn’t been so difficult, though I find I have more ways to goof off than just mindless clicking. On the other hand I’d rather watch episodes of “Sassy Girl” or write bad fantasy fiction, so it suits me even if I’m not the perfect angel one might hope.

Speaking of Sassy Girl, I’ve noticed that it tends to be an excellent motivator where noting else works. The sort of literature that espouses the power of human potential makes me feel bathed in glurge, and I’m naturally repelled by the genre of productivity porn, where if you just order your contact list the right way, somehow the magic zen wealth gnomes will give you the ability to achieve more than you ever imagined. But give me a happy over achiever story in fiction or some housekeeping books and I’m happily embroiled in my studies right away.

So, the inevitable has happened, and critter hats are invading. This generally proves my ongoing thesis that what shameless geeks are wearing will trickle down eventually. Critter hats seem to be part of a general trend towards stupid stuff on your head to keep warm, that’s also clustered around big parka frills and guys wearing those hats with ear flaps.

I’m of two minds about this trend. On the one hand, I’ve always wanted a kitty hat, on the other hand, I have a personal problem related to these hats- because of the size of my head, anything that isn’t over sized will be dispreportionate to my colassal cranium.

On the plus side, I believe I’m ordering this hat for my gentleman, since he agreed that this halloween we could go as bo-peep and sheep:

I’m under a lot of school stress, and I’ve been fairly sore with bodily tension since classes started. As of the third week of February, I finish my least favourite pat of the school term- midterms. Thanks to therapy and good medications, my strategy has adjusted from placing my head as firmly into the sand as I can, to neurotically trying to organize my tasks.

The other night (not last night, but the night before) my gentleman and I had an enormous misunderstanding related to acedemics. He found me curled into a small ball whining with stress and from my gibbering took the root of the situation to be that my midterms were next week, not that I’m a delicate flower with a low stress tolerance who weeps when things are going well. My lack of sleep and thus incoherence didn’t disabuse him of this notion and he proceeded to read me the riot act about working myself into a corner with procrastination.

Cue sobbing on my part, since I thought he was mad at me for being easily stressed. The next day I wandered off to class and while doing my usual between class studies, it occured to me why he was so upset. I came home to find him clad in clouds of steam, the last of the dirty dishes in his soapy dpaws, with a slightly guilty look and an apologetic declaration that if he was going to chew me up he’d better lead by example by doing all his chores, to which I casually mentioned that I in fact had two full weeks of study for my midterms, not the five days he had assumed and panicked over. There was a pause, and he became the gibbering one.

In any case, I’ve been spending a lot of time in the library lately, or curled up on a couch at school with a reading propped on my lap. I’m about helf done for the assinged readings for everthing up to the midterm, and my goal, which feels very reachable at the moment, is to finish the rest for Thursday. That’s about 5 chapters of Psychology (actually 1 in one class and 4 in another), 4 foreign policy readings, 6 chapters of foreign policy. There’s also a paper due on Wednesday in midterm week, which should be about 10 journal articles, as the page length is ten pages, and an idiot assignment on Freud VS evolution due this Friday, which I’m writing tonight after my voluntary french class.

Recently Apple got every nerd on the planet chirping about the ‘ipad’. their new touch pad product, and about for the past three years, kindles, and the future of ebooks have become a popular source of small talk debates, generally a divide between people who get excited over new tech for the sake of new tech and cranky purists who talk about the joys of a good old paperback. Ebooks are also at the root of a debate between a major publishing house, Macmillan and Amazon, where Amazon yanked all the works of the former from their store in a tiff over price fixing.

Another common problem cited with ebooks is DRM, which is a sort of single person liscencing from a product that is a built in self destruct in computer programs, music and other media which limits their use and makes a property vulnerable to suddenly becoming unavailable to the owner when the DRM owning company folds, allow unexpected liscencing yanking and so forth. Understandably this gets people irked. However without protection, all digital media is basically free to copy and share, making piracy extremely easy. For example gigapedia is an enormous search archive of pdfs of books, most of which are still within their copyrights.

I actually don’t mind pdfs that much. Most of my classes’ journal articles are found online through my University’s library, making paper writing an exercise to be conducted in my pajamas. I think ebooks have an important place and are not inherently bad. For example the attempts by the Gutenberg Project are comendable. Classics and out of print lit that would otherwise vanish off the shelves is preserved for free download.

Instead, what concerns me about switching to a new electronic book format is the trashy books. I really like stupid regency novels and historical romances. These are not good books, except that they make me giggle like a hyena on nitrous oxide for the time it takes to consume them. These books are published by the wagon load, formulaic crap that gets dumped into supermarkets and the back shelves of book stores and then forgotten.

I can’t afford to buy these books new; however I get a lot out of second hand shopping and libraries. Lately, living in a big city, I get a lot out of free book heaps When I buy these books second hand, many are outright unreadable or only useable once, so I cycle them back out, leaving them in cafes and Laundromats and other places. I also recycle any other books I’m bored with, from knitting guides to great lit.

Because of the sheer volume of these books I can easily steal enough to feed my reading habit, often nicely formatted into PDFs, but unless I want to actively participate in something illegal, I’m not in a position to pass books along anymore, or participate in bottom feeding from second hand book sales.

I’m also concerned what this will do to text book sales. Regularly updated, specialty books cost an arm and a leg. I understand some of this is evil on the part of publishers and some of it is the nature of the market. Right now, I can survive by buying second hand text books and professors who are lenient enough to permit using past editions, where it’s a new textbook. I am deeply pessimistic about the possibility that this will appreciably lower the cost of text books, just make it hard to get more uses out of your ‘book’.

I’m having one of those fuzzy evenings when my brain isn’t feeling like it wants to move in step with my body. I’m not sure why- I think I might not be sleeping enough because I’m having these very vivid dreams. They’re all very lurid and odd, one part from things I’ve seen during the day and one part something absaloutely absurd. I’ve had two dreams involving white supremacists (I mean skin heads). Maybe American History X made a big impression on me I didn’t know about?

Today, instead of class the professor showwed a video on Jung, who was deeply interested in the archeytypes that show up in dreams and fantasies. The video was terrible, taking a psuedo mystical direction with bad kabalah paintings and crappy synth clips, along with random 60’s stock footage and grainy sound. I wonder what he’d make of my often violent, gender swapping, disjointed narratives? My sense of ‘me’ is always very fluid, so at any moment I can snap to a portly middle aged politician trying to escape out a broken window, a man trying to survive in prison, me as I am, a princess… My dreams are the landscapes I spend the most time in or fantastic recombinations of things I’ve seen during the day. Last night I dreamed we were escaping through a city that looked like a several story shopping mall while a matriarch ruled government was trying to catch me and my plucky band of rebels. Reality was proving fairly coherent despite several casual gender swaps, and the male in the group (who I’d been, only moment ago) was trying to shoot an inflatable survey drone with a machine gun, when suddenly we introduced an inflatable helicopter. Like, with seams, life sized but made of vynil.

I get the sense that my brain is making up an explaination for a series of random images which are being generated by free association- there’s no story, just creation that explains my motive for them moment.

According to research into dream imagery, once black and white television stopped being the norm, people’s common black and white dreams stopped happening. My mother, the writer, used to dream in story voice over narrative and my brother dreams in video games. My dreams wander all over the place, but I think I’m going to be in the camp that believes that Jung is full of it, and doo-dads in my dream are personal brain randomness.

Somewhere along the way, I became a fairly good cook. Not a ‘carves shapes out of radishes’ sort of chef, or the kind that whips up a batch of lavender and liberian anchovy cupcakes on a whim, but the kind of cook that can go into a pantry full of assorted raw ingredients and come out with something ediable and a dessert.

Recently, someone gave me one of these doohickeys

Four apples of the cheapest, mangy end of season macintosh, a tiny pat of butter, two spoonfuls of brown sugar and I have an on-demand baked yummy that’s probably less than a dollar for two people. it’s even alterable- health nuts get theres without butter and sweetner, and purists get honey instead of brown sugar.