Suddenly, out of the bushes, a wild blog appears!

HELLO ALL!

It has been a hectic few weeks—much chaos and many papers! Plus two separate two-and-a-half-hour-long study abroad orientation sessions and some excellent times with friends.

The Sunday after my last blog, I had dinner with Emma (who I haven’t seen in forever) and Charmaine at the newish café near my dorm that serves crepes. Their crepes are distinctly neither French nor authentic, but they are pretty tasty nonetheless. Plus we had this bizarre yet tasty desert:

(Notice the snazzy gold leaf on top….pretentious, yes?)

Then it was time for HALLOWEEN PREPARATIONS! I got these lovely cards from my lovely parents in a lovely care package, so I put them up on our door to make it more festive.

I also made Anna a really cute Halloween postcard, but I forgot to take a picture of it. L Suffice it to say that it was adorable. There was a cut-out bat and a shiny moon and a jack-o-lantern with golden backing.

On Wednesday, I went to the English Department Halloween Treat Night, where they had remarkably adorable themed-snacks. Why are they so cute??

Near the end, Charmaine came to fetch me so we could meet Katrina and head off for Super-Target. Katrina and I bullied Charmaine into going in to get a new prescription (she had to lean in really close to see her computer and admitted that she couldn’t see the board in her classes) and we figured the least we could do was go with her. We took the bus there only to discover that they’d closed an hour early (those jerks), but at least we all managed to obtain things we needed. And by needed I mean that I got a pair of socks that I fell instantly in love with (they’re pretty and spotty and fluffy!!) and some unnecessary but excellent tights.

On the way I home I was inexplicably hyper (actually, probably it was because of consuming ridiculous amounts of sugar) and the dementors had been visiting, so everything was ridiculously foggy,

so naturally I turned the ride home into a beautiful musical. Basically every time anyone said a word or phrase that seemed relevant, I’d sing a song that reminded me of it. This started because of the mist, actually—it made Charmaine and me think of the Misty Mountains song from The Hobbit.

Charmaine got super into it.

Katrina just judged us a lot.

But in a nice way.

When we got back to the room, Charmaine and I started working on the final touches of our costumes. I made Fairfax’s costume and then made a goatee for Charmaine while she made herself a really lovely and detailed lamp. Then we decided to force Katrina to wear a costume, despite her disinterest in the whole process. She agreed to wear a costume if we figured it out, so we worked on that for a while before going to bed.

Fall interlude—because PRETTY PICTURES LOOK GUYS THERE ARE LEAVES.

AND THEN HALLOWEEN! I had classes, of course, but YA was basically just chaos and joy. We had a costume contest, which I was one of the four-way tie winners. So I got snacks. Plus Megan brought in VAST QUANTITIES of candy for everyone, which we ate excitedly while playing Halloween bingo. At the end of class she read everyone’s taro for them. She used to work at a New Age publishing house, so she knows all of those sorts of things—horoscopes, star signs, etc. She mentioned the taro cards and we all got really excited, so she promised weeks ago that she’d bring them in for Halloween. My future is apparently going to be very tumultuous.

After class, Charmaine and I went to go watch Monsters University (the Pixar prequel to Monsters Inc.), since Mac was showing it for Halloween. It was shockingly good, although also unfortunately sexist. Not so much that the one interesting female character was presented in any sexist way, but that there was one interesting female character. Damn it, Pixar. I thought you were improving since you made Brave. But, despite this major flaw, the messages of the movie were really well done. One of the characters has an unrealistic career dream—and it doesn’t work out. He finds a parallel job that he loves, but he doesn’t end up doing the thing he’d always dreamed of doing. He isn’t able to overcome the obstacles in his way, and that’s okay. It’s such a thoughtful message for a kid’s movie—and one that I think is really important.

Afterwards, Mac was hosting a Halloween party, so we stuck around for a while for that. We went to the least scary haunted house that has ever existed (I’m not even exaggerating—those ones at my elementary school fall festivals were scarier, and they were terrible) and then we took many absurd photos in the photobooth Mac had rented for the evening. I’d post them, but Charmaine still hasn’t posted them on Facebook, so I can’t. They’re crazy, though, because we tried to fit four people in an incredibly tiny stall. It was ridiculous.

And now, PICTURES!

Fairfax as Bilbo Baggins from The Hobbit (notice his furry toes!!)

 From left to right: Rachel as Jasmine, Charmaine as the Genii (both from Aladdin), Katrina as Megara (from Hercules), and me as Tonks (from the Harry Potter books).

Wesley as Westley (!!!) from The Princess Bride

On Friday, I went to see the new Ender’s Game movie with Katrina and Erin. We had a really fun time but were ultimately pretty disappointed in the movie. It wasn’t very true to the book, alas. Not that we should be surprised, at this point.

Saturday, I had dinner with Charmaine and spent the evening hanging out with my lovely roomies. On Sunday, though, I had to escape to Cahoots again in the hopes of getting some work done. I spent the whole day there, mostly alone—although Rachel and Charmaine each joined me for an hour or two during the day. I also had the most incredible cardamom cookies—mmmm. They kind of taste like Dad’s famous cardamom rolls. Not quite that brilliant, obviously, but still delicious.

The following week was pretty insane, unfortunately. Monday was that presentation for my book on colonial and postcolonial Indian art history and then there was a paper due, those two study abroad presentations, and my final workshopping piece (for my creative writing class—ten to twenty pages of my final story for the class to edit) due.

Plus, we had some exciting weather updates! We had our first real frost this week, leaving the fallen leaves traced in ice. Charmaine said they looked like they were outlined in icing, which was a nice description.

AND, on Wednesday, IT SNOWED! Unlike our official first snowfall, this snow actually stuck for a while. It was kind of lovely having the contrast between the bright fall leaves and the clean, fresh snow.

(I stole this photo from Charmaine because it was so nice.)

The snow melted very quickly, which was a little sad. 

 (about an hour after the snow pictures)

And then all the trees that still had leaves dropped the rest of them in embarrassment, 

(look at them raining from the sky!!)

so everything looks very sad and wintery now. No more color or crunch, alas!

I barely had any breathing room until Friday, when I watched Firefly with my usual group of friends. That was pretty lovely.

Then, on Saturday, I went to see 12 Years a Slave with Katrina and Charmaine—as you already know.

In the few days after seeing the movie—including Sunday, when I last posted—I wasn’t sure how to react or think critically about the experience. It’s a truly exhausting movie—my friends and I walked back to the room without talking and then sat around in semi-stunned silence for a while—and it’s incredibly difficult to separate one’s emotions from the experience. Part of this is because the movie takes care to simulate some of the psychological conditions of slavery—obviously to a much lesser extent. The audience, like the character, goes through every scene terrified that something is going to happen but never knowing—there’s a constant feeling of tension. Additionally, the movie has the most brilliant sound-editing I’ve ever heard. I never notice sound editing (soundtracks, yes, but not sound editing) unless it’s for an animated or heavily CGI-based movie (like The Hobbit), in which case I’m interested in the way they use sounds to fill out the character.

But in 12 Years a Slave, the sound editing is well-done because it is relentless—because watching this movie with your eyes closed would be nearly as horrifying an experience as with your eyes open. The audience is always submitted to the sounds of the violence—often even more than the visuals. So you can’t escape—you can’t just look away from what’s happening. The music is sometimes similarly oppressive. At one point an overseer sings “Run, N——, Run” and the sound of it is harsh, mocking, almost painful. It goes on and on, even continuing onto the next scene—it’s entirely inescapable even as the characters move into a new visual location. And, conversely, the only moment of true relief throughout the movie is a minutes-long rendition of “Roll, Jordan, Roll” in which the movie’s visual barely changes at all while the song builds and builds.

(Oh man, there's just so much text. Here's a beautifully simple poster for the movie.)

Point is, it’s an incredibly well-made movie and very deserving of the Oscar(s) it is predicted to win. The violence walks the fine, fine line between honest and gratuitous, the acting is incredibly good, it is beautifully filmed (there are some truly gorgeous moments), and there are—at most—one or two flawed moments overall. But it’s also the kind of movie that’s impossible to recommend because it’d feel like recommending that your friend go have someone punch them in the face. I think it’s a movie people should see—in the way that one should see wartime photos—and it’s one of the best-made movies I’ve seen in a long time. The craft of it is awesome in the original sense of the word. But it is also deeply and truly painful, unrelenting in its message, and without catharsis. It’s not one of those movies where you weep your heart out, but leave the theater feeling renewed (if shaky). You weep and get cramps in your hands from clinging too tightly to friends and leave feeling entirely unsure of where you go from there. If you go, budget several hours afterwards just to recover.

Basically, when my friends and I got back from the movie we had no idea what to do with ourselves. Katrina, being the magical procrastination-free human being that she is, wrote the movie into a paper she was working on, although she said that analyzing it hadn’t really helped at all. Charmaine and I just kind of huddled up with tea and blankets and stared at the walls. After a while, Hannah asked if I need to talk about it, but I couldn’t really figure out what to say—even though usually verbally processing things is exactly what I need. As some of you may remember, last semester Clockwork Orange threw me completely for a loop, leaving me weeping and miserable until I critically deconstructed it with my parents. And then wrote a completely therapeutic analytical paper about how much I hated it (that paper remains one of the better ones I’ve written). But I couldn’t do that with this movie.

Eventually, my friends and I decided that hanging out with each other and watching mindless TV was the solution to our overwhelmedness, so we watched an episode of a show (Chuck) Charmaine has wanted me to watch for years (it only just was added to Netflix).

Since I’d naturally gotten almost no work done on Saturday, I spent Sunday working at—well, I think you can guess.

(If you guessed the moon, I award you points for creativity. But you’re also wrong. If you guessed Cahoots…DINGDINGDING CONGRATULATIONS. Correct answer.)

As I also mentioned in my [very brief placeholder] blog last week, I had a paper and the first draft of another due on Tuesday, so I spent the first few days entirely exhausted. Monday night, as I was trying to exhaustedly work on the papers, Katrina and Charmaine stayed up to keep me company and ended up falling asleep on each other. I took a bunch of adorable pictures, but they ended up as broken files on my computer. I think their cute broke my camera.

 

After Tuesday, I kind of blearily coasted through the rest of the week. There were some lucky circumstances that let me have very little homework—like an assignment to read part of Said’s Orientalism for Texts and Power; luckily I’d already read the whole thing for Postcolonial Theory weeks earlier—so it wasn’t too much of a problem that my brain had ceased to exist.

Thursday night, though, I finally had my long-anticipated Doty 4 reunion with pumpkin bars!! 

Clara sent me two different homemade mixes weeks ago, so I finally found a time to gather all my friends and feed them baked goodies. We all had tea out in the lounge of my building and taste-tested the two different recipes to figure out which was better. The general consensus was that the first batch tasted more delicious, but the texture of the second was better.

It was so nice to see all (most—Emma had the flu) of them together again—it’s been quite a while. The tone was a bit somber, since everyone seems to be feeling pretty much the same way. We’re all feeling kind of detached and directionless in a surprising way—I think we all expected that we’d feel more settled junior year and we just don’t. I think part of that is that we’re all planning for our imminent departure and that inherently separates us from campus life.

On Friday my roommates and I had a board game night with Erin and Justin (Hannah’s brother). It was very silly and very fun, although we all missed Charmaine, who’s out of town this weekend. We played Apples to Apples and then Taboo and then a very confusing game called Ten Days in Africa and then dispersed to collapse in our separate beds.

And now it is Saturday! Katrina and I went to see the new Thor movie today as a lighthearted contrast to last weekend’s movie and then I spent the afternoon and evening lazing around my room. I’ll have to work hard tomorrow—final papers and their proposals are making themselves known on the near horizon—but it was nice to have some space to recover from the chaos of the last while.

I plan to post a blog next week, per my original schedule, since the week after that is Thanksgiving (and three quarters of my reading audience will be present at my adventures). It’ll be pretty short, though, since this one had to cover so much time.

See you (in a very metaphorical way for many of you, but COMPLETELY LITERALLY HOORAY for others) soon! I love you all!

P.S. I keep forgetting to show you all this. Katrina made it for me, after I awarded her a ribbon on Facebook for being the “Actual Worst.”

I put it on my door, since I don’t have a real refrigerator to display it on.

I’m so proud.

P.P.S. Katrina and Charmaine are the kind of wonderful friends with whom you can have a sudden, unexpected moment of mourning with for the library of Alexandria prompted by something read on the internet. And then you can read the passage from Arcadia to them:

“THOMASINA: ....the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue. Oh, Septimus! -- can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides -- thousands of poems -- Aristotle's own library!....How can we sleep for grief?

SEPTIMUS: By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?”

and all of you can agree that Tom Stoppard is amazing and that, as much as we adore Septimus's answer, we're still going to mourn.

Why am I so lucky??