Think of 20 albums that had such a profound effect on you they changed your life or the way you looked at it. They sucked you in and took you over for days, weeks, months, years. These are the albums that you can use to identify time, places, people, emotions. These are the albums that no matter what they were thought of musically shaped your world. When you finish, tag 20 others, including me. Make sure you copy and paste this part so they know the drill. Get the idea now? Good. Tag, you’re it!

Keep in mind I was exposed to pop music at 12. So really I had a late start.

1) Tegan & Sara – The Con
2) The Dixie Chicks – Home
3) Aimee Mann – Lost in Space
4) Tegan & Sara – So Jealous
5) Ryan Adams – Gold
6) Band of Horses – Cease to Begin
7) Ryan Adams – Demolition
Renan Luce – Repenti
9) Atmosphere – Strictly Leakage
10) The Decemberists – The Crane Wife
11) The Shins – Wincing the Night Away
12) Aimee Mann – The Forgotten Arm
13) The Beatles – Abbey Road
14) Pink – Missundaztood (seriously I loved this album. I don’t care what you think.)
15) Weezer – The Green Album
16) The Dixie Chicks – Fly
17) Pauline Croze – Un Bruit qui Court
18) Hilary Hahn Plays Bach
19) Sheryl Crow – self-titled
20) Red Hot Chili Peppers – By the Way

I tried to do it in order of importance, not chronological. It’s kinda sketchy.

1. Allergies
2. Allergies
3. Allergies
4. Waiting to restore my files to my computer so that I can use Microsoft Word, Mail, read blogs again, do tabbed browsing in Safari…
5. Allergies
6. My canker sore
7. This little finger print crack on my thumb. I broke down and put a band-aid on it.
8. Allergies
9. Foot pain
10. Allergies

Yesterday I was okay when I was inside but as soon as I stepped outside I could feel it in my eyes. It’s just weird to be walking around with all these people who are (seem to be) operating normally and in a world where the outdoors doesn’t hurt. For one thing, they all walk really slow.

The woman I rent my apartment from sent me an e-mail that was kind of touching. She said she came to Paris in her 20s and big cities were more important to her then than nature. Except that I miss the outdoors here as much, maybe more, than I would if I were in rainy northern France. We get all these beautiful, warm, sunny days, and it just makes me feel like crap. Going outside to “enjoy” it would be insane. What I really need is rain. It’s so dry out that I worry that the mountain cedar will never actually die but instead pollenate year-round. I can’t say it was a mistake to move here, since the program is right for me. But I do think it would be just stupid to put myself through another year of this. I’m running out of energy to even be angry about it. (And I am. Angry.)

Btw am v. happy Sean Penn won for Milk. That movie made me cry. Also, heart Kate Winslet very much. But I thought Mickey Rourke would probably win.

Am hopeful that it will not be so devastating this time. Replacing it was quick and easy and only cost me $100 and now I have a uselessly large amount of GB (120, I will not fill this unless I keep everything for years… or maybe take more pictures). Also this time the hard drive comes with a 5-year manufacturer’s warranty.

Large hiccup though: I don’t buy new Mac OS systems. I don’t have the money to spend $100 every time a new one comes out. So I get them from my dad. So this computer came with the 10.4 discs. The back-up program Time Machine only runs off of 10.5, which I’ve now lost because I had to reboot the new hard drive from discs.

Am going to see if I can download a more recent Safari because I need tabs back.

It’s weird how attached to and comfortable I get with my operating system and software.

at the parents’ new house. Is a bit weird not knowing things such as where are light switches in the dark. But I like the house a lot, and the neighborhood is really pretty with lots of old houses of all sizes and all styles. Allergies are pretty bad this weekend or I would go out for a walk.

Mom is making bread and then they are driving me up to Austin tonight so we can eat at the Clay Pit.

Really nothing’s going on but I hated leaving the bitter allergy post there at the top of the page.

There are lots of reasons why being allergy-sick is different from being virus-sick.

1) There’s no chance of recuperation. Lying around all day is way easier than doing stuff but there’s no way it’ll get you any better. (Staying inside, on the other hand, can help a lot, but as soon as you go outside, that’s all down the drain)
2) Because of #1 you end up going places, like work, and class, where people have normal expectations of you that you just can’t live up to.
3) Which they don’t really understand. If you’re out, in normal logic, it must mean you’re feeling well enough to work and study, which isn’t necessarily true. I just don’t want to use up all my sick day capital on allergy season, which, as anyone who has read through all these boring allergy posts can tell by now, is several months here.
4) You sometimes still feel up to doing things where people don’t have expectations of you, like hanging out with friends, and yet you feel all guilty for not going to class but considering doing other things, even though there’s a real reason you can do one and not the other. (Again, #1, without a car, getting to class is a real bitch because it involves going outside for up to half an hour at a time. Having a car wouldn’t really help though, the parking lots are a ten-minute walk from class anyway. Getting to someone’s house when they pick me up in their car is a lot, a LOT easier.)
5) It’s also hard to tell how shitty you feel until you get someplace where people have their normal expectations of you. Because staying inside and doing things where you don’t have to perform physically (work) or intellectually (school) is way, way easier.

Basically, I came to campus to take a test, I’m waiting for my tutee to arrive, then I’m going home and thinking of not going to class tonight so I can avoid the half-hour outside/1-hour-long recovery twice over.

“Quand on arrive dans une ville, on voit des rues en perspective, des suites de bâtiments vides de sens. Tout est inconnu, vierge. Plus tard, on aura habité cette ville; on aura marché dans ses rues; on aurait été au bout des perspectives; on aura connu ses bâtiments; on aura vécu des histoires avec des gens. Quand on aura vécu dans cette ville, cette rue on l’aura prise dix, vingt, mille fois… Au bout d’un moment, tout ça vous appartient parce qu’on y a vécu. C’est ce qui allait m’arriver, et je le savais pas encore.”
-L’Auberge Espagnole

Sorry, I couldn’t resist this one.

Apparently the BBC (I guess this is from their Top 100 list at The Big Read? but I couldn’t find the six-person thing on their site) reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.

I actually bolded my favorites and italicized the ones I hope to read because that seemed more interesting. I don’t know why I had to demonstrate to you what bolding and italicizing are.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen x +
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien x +
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte x +
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling x
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee x
6 The Bible- (well, parts)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte x
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell x
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens x
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott x +
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles РThomas Hardy x
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller x + I recently finally bought myself a copy of this.
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare x + (most of them anyway)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier x
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien x +
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife РAudrey Niffenegger x +
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell x +
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald x (though I can’t say I remember it very well)
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy РDouglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh * (mostly want to read this because of Jeremy Irons… is that wrong?)
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck *
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll x
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis x
34 Emma – Jane Austen x
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen x +
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis x
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini x
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin РLouis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden x +
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne x
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving x +
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins x
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery x +
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale РMargaret Atwood x
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding x
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan x +
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen x
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon x
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck x
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov x +
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold x (good book)
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac x
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary РHelen Fielding x +
69 Midnight’s Children РSalman Rushdie *
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett x
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson * (feel strongly that I may have skimmed this at some point)
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath x +
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome x
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker x +
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert x
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web РEB White x
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom x
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery X
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare x
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl x
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo x (well, large sections of it)

it was a bad idea to have my boyfriend of the time set up wordpress for me when I started this blog. And I remember being frustrated that he wasn’t explaining everything to me but then I figured we’d be together for years so it wouldn’t really matter. Over time I’ve figured out how to edit my own templates and found my own free ftp software (I still use Cyberduck). Anna and I have sent a proposal to our conference here that is blog-related and so I had to start a new blog and it was incredibly, incredibly frustrating. But I succeeded! Mostly it was confusing figuring out where on my web server to create a new database, and I never did figure out how to run two blogs off of one database, though it’s supposed to be possible.

Speaking of web servers, ours doesn’t have the latest mySQL and php. Can anyone out there recommend a good one that does? We pay so little now per year ($40 including domain registration) that I’m reluctant to switch but I’d really like to move beyond WordPress 1.5.

Instructor of French

Except that it’s in Muncie, Indiana. Also, probably not quite experienced enough.

Really refreshing. I went into campus this morning and then my tutoring student canceled on me so I spent 2 hours doing homework before my research meeting that ended early. So then I ran all my errands (including buying a new pair of Danskos!–in brown brush-off leather) and was back here by 2:30. So then I took a nap. Am amazed that I was tired enough to sleep that hard. And now it is not even 5 and I have most of the work done that I meant to get done and alllll evening to myself. Is quite frankly amazing.

Still feeling grumpy about grad lit class. But I reviewed the other choices and realized the reason I didn’t even consider taking an undergrad lit class was because I had read many of the books on their reading lists already. So am just going to suck it up. Well, will try anyway.

Also am slightly grumpy about transcribing in my undergrad ling class. Surely there is actually an m in embarquer? an eng in anguille?’ an n in entier? is it really possible to close up your velum immediately as you close your lips and whatnot? I think not. And when I mentioned it they answered by explaining to me what is a nasal vowel. Which, by the way, know.

Sorry for gripe. Also ordered a bag from zappos. Considered this and this as well but decided to go less formal and more space. Is for school.

Had my first couchsurfer this past weekend and she was quite nice. I felt like a little bit of a loser for not knowing better where to take her but we went to Sixth Street which always impresses me. I mean, not so much the bars on it, but the sheer number of people who are out walking in the streets, the number of street stands selling food that smells good and not-so-good, and the amount of music coming both out of the bars and from the miscellaneous bums playing miscellaneous improvised instruments in the street. I think she had a good time.