To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive

So I watched a whole lot of TV last week. Sunday night, we showed Kate and Meg "The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances," because everyone needs to see those. I showed them the Fifth Doctor two-parter (only 20 minutes each, thank God) "Black Orchid," then I showed it to Chandra. (Ellen couldn't take the eightiesness of it and had to leave partway through. Silly girl.) So...lots of TV. Followed by lots more TV, with a side helping of audios.

And here's lots of commentary. Lengthwise, it's the equivalent of a ten-page essay. Yeah. Amazing what a bit of NO MORE SCHOOL EVER until grad school/library school will do for one's time and inclination towards fannish activities. Now I just need to put some of this energy towards finding a job...

( Black Orchid ramblings )

On Monday (or possibly it was Tuesday) I also watched ( Earthshock )

I also got my hands on a copy of the parody, ( The Curse of Fatal Death )

( One more thought about TEC/TDD, with a reference to TGitF )

( And finally, the promised Eighth Doctor Audios spaz post. Spoilers through 'Other Lives.' )

I passed my comps!!!!

Yay!!!!

No distinction, but, eh. I kind of figured that, since I did poetry. (Matz read my comps, hee!) Whatever, I passed! YAY!

And I would totally celebrate, except I still have three papers to write for this week. Perhaps I'll delay the celebrating until next week.

God, I hate April (academically, anyway; the weather was actually halfway decent today, and there are daffodils blooming). *hates on essays* Once I add in a header and full footnote information instead of just last names and page numbers, I'll have not quite eight pages on the P&T paper. It's not getting any better, folks. It's just not. And I have the unusual problem of feeling like I don't have enough information to make twelve pages (I probably actually do, and am just underestimating myself because that's what I do). Every other paper I've written, the problem has been exactly the opposite. Oops.

That's due Tuesday. I'm aiming to finish a draft before tomorrow's DW airing, then spend Sunday revising it into something that'll work for a first draft. Saturday is definitely going to be spent on the time travel story for Fiction. Still aiming to have that done by Tuesday as well, so I can have a week to revise it and make sure it makes exactly the amount of sense I want it to make. Then there's another mini-essay for P&T and yet another one for Mongolian due that next same week... *hates*

Of course, I'd be in better shape if I hadn't spent up until today procrastinating in the most apalling manner, but not much I can do about that now. Sigh. This is why you pick interesting essay topics, people. Otherwise, you avoid them, and nothing good comes of it.

I graduate in LESS THAN TWO MONTHS. How did this happen?

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Obligatory Who-related babble:

I found out recently that India Fisher, sister to Francesca Hunt (who played Rebecca Fogg in the late, lamented Secret Adventures of Jules Verne), does the voice of one of the Eighth Doctor's companions in the Big Finish audio dramas. This really quite amused me, and it totally wasn't because I'm a few pages into a DW/SAJV crossover that will probably never actually be finished, but totally includes a ripoff of the corset scene from "Southern Comfort" with Ten and Rose in it. *pokes around a bit about Charley Pollard* HA! Francesca guest-starred in one of India's adventures. Hmmm. *contemplates* That would be entertaining to hear. *pokes more* Oh, and there's canon-ish Eight/Charley 'ship, according to Wikipedia. Awww.

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( Quiz for the heck of it )

After meaning to have six pages on my TVA paper by the end of today, I have...half a paragraph.

The problem with Doctor Who, see, is that because of this whole regeneration thing, it can very much be like having ten different fandoms for the price of one. This is really quite bad from a time-management standpoint. This weekend's poison has been the Fifth Doctor, and more specifically Five/Tegan. I'm...not really sure why I picked them. I think it had something to do with an entertaining-looking fic summary somewhere, maybe Whofic, combined with remembering reading somewhere that her leaving was a bit different and more interesting than most. Also, someone wrote "Tegan is like the Eeyore of the TARDIS" as an intro to one of their fics, and I have to say, I immediately felt a kinship with her.

But now that I have wasted NEARLY THREE WHOLE DAYS, I really ought to get some work done. Bah. There is no way this paper is going to be interesting, that's why I'm avoiding it...

Comps test in four days. Still not worried. Really hoping everything I've been told is correct and that reading all the books and being able to string together fairly coherent sentences are more than is necessary to pass...

A compliation of the past 24 hours on my computer:

- I think I broke something laughing at this. And now I have the llama song stuck in my head.

- Remember how I was thinking "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" would make the best vid ever for Doctor/Rose? Well, someone actually did it. (Or rather, it's a Beatles medley with that as part of it; whatever.) Ha!

- I am currently devouring every video/audio clip and/or photo I can get of David Tennant. God, the man is ADORABLE. The accent makes him even more so. And he was a DW fanboy! Hee! Not to mention he sounds fairly intelligent when some reporter shoves a microphone in front of his face, which is always a plus.

- I've never seen it (although I think PBS may be doing its usual import of BBC dramas and including it this year, yay!), but from what I can tell, Blackpool could best be described as "cracktastic." Check out Clip 4 here, and a longer clip in the comments here. The police capture a teenage criminal while lip-synching and doing Broadway-style dance to The Smiths? Meh? I sat there for a long time afterwards going, "...the who in the what now?" And then I watched it a few more times because it was just so bizarre.

- I would hope that this has been recc'ed all over the damn internet by now, but if you've missed it: Nostalgia's Notes on the Domestication of Birds. Mind-bendy and heart-bendy and perfect. F'r instance: "Either way people didn't tend to hang about and he could stand there trying to look deeply immersed in official Tesco thoughts. Tesco Value thoughts, perhaps, which weren't as good but were a better deal for that penny people were always offering for them." Exactly what you're thinking has happened has happened, and it is done so. well.

- I finally found some reeeeally good DW vids here. Very good. castalianspring, I think you would particularly enjoy the music of the "Exile" vid, even if you're not a Who fan.

- laserhead, I can't believe I didn't rec this series to you earlier, since I found it about a month ago, but...you must read it. The regeneration makes the tenth Doctor into a chemist. I assume, since the author is getting a chem degree, the chem stuff is fairly accurate.

This post has totally not been brought to you by me meticulously working my way through the archives of time_and_chips. Not at ALL.

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Spent the morning at the public library. Found out that the archives of the Tennessean and Nashville Banner are not indexed. Oof. Spent a while flicking through some reels of microfilm before giving up and deciding to get as many actual dates as possible before trying that again, instead of just waltzing in with "1933-1940." Ugh. Lord, flicking through microfilm that fast gives me a headache like nothing else.

Now, I'm off to tackle me some Blake for comps. Ick.

Comps are half over! Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!

Although I did have a minor heart attack around 1 PM this afternoon when we all discovered that we had to have a paragraph explaining "the genesis of your project and why you feel it is an appropriate culmination fothe English major." Way to not tell us that, ever, and hide it away in a dim and dusty corner of the website. Oy.

But the written part is done. All that remains is to finish Blake, finish Paradise Lost, finish Persuasion, and take the test on April 1.

Of course, now I have to catch up on all the work that didn't get done this weekend because of comps (and possibly because of frivolity involving Doctor Who... *whistles innocently*)

Speaking of which, hand!porn has infested the story I'm writing for Fiction class. Of course, it is about ballroom, and is thus somewhat more appropriate. Still.

Comments replies after Thursday, I believe. I really do love you all, but...yeah. Proposal. Annotated bibliography. Gah.

P.S. I succumbed to the Johari window madness. Le sigh.

Yaaaaaaaaaaay!

I think I finally figured out a workable topic for my P&T paper. I was going to do songcatchers in Appalachia, but I couldn't find hardly anything aside from the movie of the same name. Not even much on the Federal Music Project of which some of them were a part, which is very strange, as I definitely remember learning about it at some point in middle or high school. Huh.

But anyway, I decided to combine it with research about the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority; builds dams and generates power and such) to see if I can draw some conclusions about how the New Deal better integrated certain parts of Southern Appalachia with the rest of the country. Surely I can get between 12 and 15 pages out of that combination.

ALL DONE, YAY.

*collapses*

I think I might go to bed even more stupidly early tonight than last night. Then, y'know, start on comps work. But at least I've promised myself to concentrate on the poetry-writing part of that over break...

For my Linguistics paper, in which I'm doing a linguistic analysis of scenes from Elizabethtown, I'm supposed to include a section on the "communicative effect" of the "speech event," which as far as I know, basically means "describe the interaction."

So of course I have a whole paragraph on how Drew and Claire talking on the plane and her offering to draw him a map from Louisville to Elizabethtown is foreshadowing of the fact that she will be his key to understanding his family (his translator, even), and that she's playing Virgil to his Dante in the dark, dark wood of northern Kentucky.

I am SUCH AN ENGLISH MAJOR.

Should be:
- 45 lines of The Seafarer translated into modern English
- 40 lines of The Wanderer translated into modern English
- Books 5-9 of Paradise Lost read
- Two comps poems written, one completed/revised
- The second half of Persuasion looked at, with an eye to finishing sometime soon

Is:
- 45 lines of The Seafarer translated into modern English
- 10 lines of The Wanderer translated
- Book 5 of Paradise Lost read
- One comps poem started
- Another round of cursing at the poem that won't end completed
- Persuasion given several looks of revulsion

About par for Thanksgiving break, really. *shrug*

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I felt cheated by "Trophee Eric Bompard" not being on this week (it's next week; I misread the schedule on Monday :(), so I popped in some of my old ice dance tapes. Lord, I'd forgotten what horrors in costuming were committed in the early nineties. Not that they ever stopped being committed; the ones in my icon are circa 2000, I believe, but...whoa. 1993 was just painful. Like, neon Spandex painful. Even illusion fabric usually isn't quite that bad. (Punsalan and Swallow and your lime green horror, I'm looking at you.) At least the skating was still nice. I'd forgotten about Roca/Sur's "Perhaps" program (to the Cake version of the song, no less). Heh. They're such good actors, in addition to the lovely skating.

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( Snakes on a Plane meme )

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I feel a strong desire to see some Invisible Man episodes. I wonder if I have any on tape anywhere. Or maybe I'll be really lazy and just make do with fic, thus not having to move from the couch...