It lives!

Jet lag, hurrah! This would be why I've been up since 3 A.M. However, I did not miss any of my flights, managed not to puke my guts out, and while my coccyx is still sore from sitting for so long, no permanent damage was incurred.

I had yesterday to generally lounge around (which involved getting a SIM card for my China!phone, reassuring my mother that no, the rug you're looking at buying is not too big to fit in the living room, and attending an Ayyam-i-Ha party).

The latter was fun but also somewhat discomfiting. Last night was the first time that I attended a Baha'i event since officially leaving the faith a little over a year ago, and I still had this incredibly visceral reaction to the prayers and readings, where part of me was trying to find meaning in the words since I had spent fifteen years trying to force myself to do so and feeling incredibly guilty for not actually believing any of it. And the other part of me was, probably for the first time, noticing how powerful (and dare I say manipulative?) the writing actually is. Thankfully, this helped me feel better about my previous commitment to creating a hole in my life in which to shove religion. I don't know if other people who have left the religion they grew up experience this sort of thing, where even though you no longer believe (or want to believe) that the writings have some sort of spooky supernatural direct line to god you still fall into the habit of seeing them as such. I hope so, as it would make me feel less stupid.

In other news, I read Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal on the first half of my flight, and it was truly excellent, not only in its analysis of the purpose that games serve in our life, but also in creating a vision in which they can be harnessed for social change. I'd like to go further into how awesome this is, but I'm tired and need to be up because...

I actually have work today! I'm going to be transcribing interviews about critical thinking and its application in different disciplines for. It's wonderful to transcribe things on a topic that you find interesting, especially since if that is the case, chances are you're already familiar with the jargon that might come up.

So, off to get myself out of bed and shower. Have a good day!

Announcements

1. I'm leaving for China on Friday. Itinerary below.

3:30 AM Friday, February 25th- Drive to the closest airport. Pray it doesn't snow. End up leaving earlier due to "chance of snow". Sit in the airport for an hour as it's not actually snowing. 

6:00 AM- Flight to Seattle that they claim is 1:30 long but is actually no longer than 00:45. There isn't even time to serve peanuts and watery orange juice. 

7:00 AM-1:00 PM- Despair over the airport not having free wifi. Sit in the Borders Books in Sea-Tac. Contemplate buying books for flight. Willpower fails. Buy books. Possibly also coffee and a bagel. 

1:00 PM-?????- fly from Seattle to Beijing. Total of 13 hours. Forget to reset watch, think flight is shorter than it actually is. Despair. Read books. Try to sleep. Ask for more coffee. Read 3-day-old newspapers in English and then in Chinese. Spot amusing mistranslation. Giggle madly for ten minutes. Compose myself after stewardess tells me I'm disturbing the other passengers. Pound on my keyboard. Fall asleep. Stare out the window three seats away. Rinse and repeat. 

4:30 PM Saturday, February 26th- Arrive in Beijing. 

4:30-8:30 PM- Revel in the fact that the Beijing International Airport has free wifi (or at least did the last time that I was there). Entertain myself. Pinch myself to keep from falling asleep and missing my flight. 

8:30-10:30 PM- Fly to Ningbo. Curse the fact that I couldn't fly into Shanghai as there isn't a flight from Shanghai to Ningbo anymore. Curb zombieness. 

10:30 PM- Collapse. 

2. When I get to China, there will hopefully be lots of China-related posts. If for some reason my usual way of circumventing Ye Great Olde Firewall (Tor) isn't, Pinkyboo will post for me. I shall not be silenced!

3. I got a second pair of piercings in my lobes yesterday, and am quite pleased with the way they turned out. This brings the total of holes in my head to eleven.

4. I have not been able to get this crazy song out of my head for the past week, so I've decided to share the misery. Long live the dragonqueen!

Clubemubentubines!

Things I've considered blogging about of late: 

• Why I use "kyriarchy" and what I mean by it. 
• My feelings on jargon in general. 
• The differences between the ways I interact with and participate in society depending on whether I'm in America or China. 
• A dream I had recently in which I was part of a doughnut smuggling operation. 
• The fact that I've had "Oh My Darling Clementine" stuck in my head all afternoon (in ubbi dubbi, no less!), with speculation that it might be due to me eating a spectacularly flavourless clementine with lunch. 
• The ways in which my society makes life difficult for people with eating disorders. 
• My insecurities about doing anything that might border on "artistic" or "creative". 
• The ways in which the hodgepodge of schooling/educational philosophies to which I have been exposed has influenced me. 
• Toxoplasma gondii
• The false positive paradox

I hope to write about most of these things eventually (maybe not the clementine...), but right now my brain seems to be stuck in consumption mode rather than production. Maybe later. For now, I'm going to go back to devouring some probably terrible YA books I checked out from the library. 

Blogging about books makes my beauteous heart burst!

Because I don't feel like doing a "real" blog post today, since that would require some sort of cohesive thought process as opposed to the ramblings that are going on in my head right now, I thought that I might do a book meme post. Because I love books, and memes. I also like subversion, and by I refuse to tag people, I'm subverting the entire meme paradigm, which is built on culture and cannot be sustained without tagging. Right?

1. What author do you own the most books by?
J. K. Rowling, as I own all of the Harry Potter books as well as The Tales of Beedle the Bard, Quiditch Through the Ages, and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. That makes 10, if I am counting correctly.

2. What book do you own the most copies of?
By acident, I own two copies each of Holes and Matilda.

3. Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?
Yes!

4. What fictional character are you secretly in love with? 
Secret? Ha! And you cannot seriously expect me to choose only one. In no particular order...

Willow Rosenberg
Daniel Osbourne
Tara Maclay
Richard Merrill (Mairelon)
George Weasley
Hermione Granger
Remus Lupin
Codex (Cyd Sherman)
Angela Hodgins
Alexis Castle

5. What book have you read the most times in your life? 
Probably either The Lorax or the Little House in the Prairie series.

6. Favourite book as a ten-year-old? 
Anne of Green Gables, the Dragonriders of Pern series, and Harry Potter. I remember being furious because my maths teacher wouldn't let me read Goblet of Fire under my desk even after I had finished all the assigned problems AND homework. The injustice! And I got Moreta of Pern confiscated in science class a short while later. I think that series was the only sex ed I got until I was old enough to look things up on the internet. Oh, the scars...


7. What is the worst book you've read in the past year? 
Twilight. Not only is it poorly written, I have some serious issues with the messages it contains.

8. What is the best book you've read in the past year? 
I truly cannot choose. I've read (and reread) so many excellent books. The one that comes to mind at the moment is Little Brother by Cory Doctorow.

9. If you could force everyone you know to read one book, what would it be? 
I don't like the idea of forcing anyone to read anything.

10. What book would you most like to see made into a movie? 
Peeps by Scott Westerfeld. It would be awesomely creepy.

11. What is the most difficult book you've ever read? 
The tome of a history textbook I used when I was fourteen. Uuuuugh.

12. What is your favourite book? 
You have got to be kidding me. I'll pick the last one for each genre that I can think of. Please don't make me try to come up with a comprehensive list, I will surely fail.
Childrens: Frindle by Andrew Clements
YA: Nation by Terry Pratchett
Scifi: The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
Fantasy: American Gods by Neil Gaiman
General fiction: A Dirty Job by Chris Moore
Mystery: the Mary Russell series by Laurie R. King
Nonfiction: The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould

13. What is your favourite play? 
Henry V by Will Shakespeare.

14. Poem? 
No idea.

15. Essay? 
A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift.

16. Who is the most overrated writer alive today? 
Gonna have to say Stephenie Meyer.

17. What is your desert island book? 
Something practical about surviving on a desert island.

18. What are you reading right now? 
Parasite Rex by Carl Zimmer. 'Tis moste excellente. With extraneous E's.