I have a million things I should have done today, including research a paper, read Portrait of a Lady, watch Black Books with a friend, watch Jean-Luc Godard films for a paper, look for jobs, look for apartments, get off the couch, etc. (I did get laundry and dishes done, and watch a lot of Deep Space 9, but eh.)

Instead, I did this: The Frame. Which is now a repository for articles and longer-form reviews and such that I’ve written, mostly school stuff. I found the WordPress theme that underlies it a few days ago (here), and couldn’t wait to see what I could do with it, and after spending most of the day fiddling with the code and posting stuff (some of which was already there from earlier experiments), I’m now officially in love with it. IN LOVE. Definitely one of the best CMS/magazine-style WordPress themes I’ve found, and also easier to modify than most.

Now, that doesn’t mean I’m moving over there or anything like that; it’s got a completely different purpose to this blog. Some content might be doubled, but that’s it. I did just post up the paper I wrote for Critical Theory earlier this semester, dealing with last year’s unplanned pregnancy films. It’s currently my favorite paper I ever wrote. Largely because the professor told me it was excellent, and that tends to improve my reaction to my own writing.

Anyway, I don’t know how many things I’ll actually post over there, but as I said, as of right now I love it. I love it so much I sort of want to make other people join me and start some sort of film/literature article/review co-op site.

I’m safely back in Texas after a week at home and a week doing nothing (in the best possible way) in Minnesota; classes start back up tomorrow, and while I’m not really ready to start writing papers again, I realized yesterday that I won’t be in the newbie group anymore and I’ll get to meet some new people entering the program this year. So that should be fun. Trying to get the rest of my books at the bookstore tomorrow along with 10,000 other students probably won’t be, though. Ah, well.

Some of you may have gotten incoming links or trackbacks from jandysmeanderings.the-frame.com today; in case you did, don’t panic or change your links yet. I’m working on replacing the site that was at www.the-frame.com (which I hadn’t updated for like two years) with something a bit more up-to-date, but it may involve moving this blog–I was testing the exporting/importing function today. It may move to the jandysmeanderings subdomain, or I may just put it at the base www.the-frame.com URL. I’m still playing with my host and figuring out what’s going to work the best. Not to mention playing with WordPress themes to find something I can use as a CMS (as opposed to something that looks like a blog). I found one I like a lot, but trying to modify the code to let me center the whole layout–it’s left-justified now, which I think looks stupid–stymied me. Anyone conversant enough in CSS and PHP to help me fix it?

It’s always dangerous to advertise upcoming posts because I run the risk of not following through, but do expect June’s book and movie recap within the next day or two, and a rundown of what looks interesting on the fall TV schedule. Plus SYTYCD videos, and maybe some excerpts from the Australian Idol auditions. I’m not even kidding when I emphasize how different (and probably better) Australian Idol is going to be from American Idol this year–in the first audition episode, ALL of the contestants sent on to Sydney were singer-songwriter types; not a typical pop voice among them. I’ll get back into doing Music Mondays one of these weeks, but it may not be this week. I haven’t had time (or broadband access) to check out any new music lately; if I did Music Monday this week, it would probably be All Beatles All The Time, since I listened to them almost nonstop both on the way to St. Louis and on the way home.

Everybody, please go read my friend Sarah’s post. Especially if you’ve ever wondered about us crazy internet people and our internet friendships. I’ve not been terribly vocal about my internet friendships, for all the reasons that Sarah says in her post. But people who know me well may know that I went to Austin last spring for a Veronica Mars fanparty/event, and that in 2004 (I think) I went to LA for an Angel party, both times largely to meet people who I’d met and talked with on a Buffy fanboard and later, Livejournal. Many of these people I’ve now known for five years, which is longer than many of my real-life friends, certainly longer than my current college friends. But it’s sometimes hard to tell people that some of your best friends you may only know online. I’ve been fortunate enough to meet most of my closest online friends in person by now, but that doesn’t change how we met.

There’s really nothing else to say except to read what Sarah has to say–she’s taken my thoughts and put them into eloquent words.

I just found out that one of my friends committed suicide on Thursday. I met her a few years ago on one of the Buffy fanboards, we roomed together in LA for a weekend, and she was really wonderful person–always had the right thing to say when I was down, or any of our friends needed help. She suffered from severe bipolar disorder which played havoc with her moods and self-image…I know she was miserable a lot of the time, but there were so many people who loved her. I really don’t know what to say or do, except pray for her family–she left a husband and a three-year-old son.

dilettante (dil-i-tahnt)

1. A person who enjoys the arts.
2. An amateur, someone who dabbles in a field out of casual interest rather than as a profession or serious interest.
3. A person with a broad but superficial interest in an art or a branch of knowledge. (Sometimes derogatory.)

(via Wiktionary)

And also, 4. Jandy.

Yes, this is what I have decided I am. About everything. I want to know a little about everything, but I’m content with a little. We’re reading Sir Thomas Browne right now for Metaphysical Poetry and Prose, and I cannot decide whether I think it’s interesting or if I hate it enough to scream. The reason for my antagonistic reactions is this: We’re reading it as literature, but the section I’m reading (and have to present on, which is another part of the problem) is Hydriotaphia, or Urn-Buriall, which is about some burial urns they dug up in Norfolk in 1656, and is mostly concerned with the archaeological, anthropological, historical, and metaphysical thoughts that Browne had based on his examination of the remains (he was a doctor). From the point of view of historical forensic anthropology, it’s rather intriguing. And his breadth of knowledge on classical burial methods, etc., is astounding. But as literature? Meh. I honestly can’t figure out what I’m going to say about it, because it’s mostly a list of facts and conjectures about these urns. I know it’s supposed to be more than that, because people persist in studying it as literature. (In fact, though, I think the fifth section is the one that really gets into his contemplation on mortality and stuff like that, and I’m only doing sections I-III, and given the lack of time moving towards the end of the semester, I haven’t read the rest.)

My point is, I actually liked reading this for the archaeological stuff. Forensics interests me. But not much beyond what’s on CSI or Bones. And the fact that friends who have actually studied anthropology tell me that CSI and Bones get it wrong far oftener than they get it right makes no difference. It’s the idea of it that I like, not the actual details. And that’s true for me in so much else, as well.

Why is it that my interests seem to range so far (anthropology, history of all times, cultures of all places, computers, even math given the right problem), yet when it comes to taking classes in my own chosen subject area of literature, I can’t find any that I want to take for a whole semester? I nearly threw a hissy-fit when I thought I was going to have to take a whole class on Wordsworth and Coleridge. Do I honestly hate them that much? No. I just would prefer to spend, say, a week on each one, rather than two months. I’m content with reading a few of their poems, getting the gist of what they’re like, then I want to move on to something new. Casual interest. Dilettantism.

Now, people who know my tendency toward obsession will say “wait a minute!” And yes, I do sometimes tend toward obsessions that hold me hostage for months or even years at a time. Figure Skating. Horses. Buffy. American Idol. I don’t know quite how to reconcile the obsessive side of me with the dilettante side of me yet. But the worrisome trend is that the things that obsess me are rarely things that would be considered important in any sense of the word important, at least not in the WAY they obsess me. Could I transfer my love of Buffy into a career in television studies? Possibly, but I don’t think I’d like it. I enjoy memorizing facts and quotes and watching the show, but any attempt I’ve made to turn that enjoyment into anything much deeper has ended with me liking the show LESS. Same thing happened a few weeks ago in class–we were looking at a sonnet by Edmund Spenser which I’d really enjoyed reading myself, but by the time we finished dissecting the meter and all the poetic devices in class, I didn’t like it anymore. Through too much study, it had lost whatever it was about it that I liked in the first place.

I don’t know where I’m going with this. I’m particularly down at the moment…I’m not only procrastinating, I don’t even care that I’m procrastinating like I usually do. I just don’t care at all. Hopefully Christmas break will revive me. I thought I’d be in high heaven only having to take literature classes. But I miss the variety and stimulation of electives. I want to throw in some philosophy, some programming, even some math…something to keep my whole brain on its toes. (How about that for a mixed metaphor?) I want to dabble. I want to be an amateur in everything. I want broad knowledge, not deep knowledge. Attempts at deep knowledge only make me squirm for variety. I am a dilettante.

edit:

Oh, and also. I’m content with just knowing these things. I do enjoy talking about them with other people, or showing off my knowledge (because I am a show-off, I admit it, as much as I try to curb the impulse–except around my family, they get the brunt of it), but as far as wanting to come up with something new, or add something to the pool of scholarship or whatever? Yeah, don’t care. It’s not that I want to hoard all the knowledge and not give back to the community, or whatever, but unless I have the opportunity to interact directly with someone about it (i.e., in conversation, or commenting on a blog post–I define my thoughts based on opposition, on reaction against something I read and disagree with somewhere else), I don’t feel the need to come up with some new insight on things I’m studying. As if there’s really that many new insights that are actually worthwhile anymore, anyway. The only thing that really interests me in terms of my own writing is taking the things that have already been said and synthesizing them into more concise, cogent, and accessible terms–terms that could be moved from the realm of academia into the realm of non-academia. But I don’t know that there’s a market for that in either academia or non-academia. The academics want to keep it, and the non-academics don’t want it anyway.

I fail at cooking.

So I’m doing Hamburger Helper, right? Simple, right? Just brown the beef, throw in the noodles and sauce mix, simmer for 15 minutes, right? Well, to start with, I had frozen the beef a couple of weeks ago. Planning ahead (!), I put it in the refrigerator yesterday morning to thaw it out. Tonight, still not completely thawed out, so I put it in the pan anyway, and started hacking it apart as best I could. That part actually worked out surprisingly well. The real problem came when I pulled out the Hamburger Helper box and discovered that in addition to two cups of water, I also had to provide a cup and a half of milk. Which I ran out of four or five days ago (I don’t like milk, and I often go for several days without using it, either after I finish my half gallon or after I’ve thrown it out). But, I’ve got this browned beef here, so I’ve got to use it. So I put in some extra water and some butter, thinking maybe that would account for the milk.

Apparently, I didn’t put in ENOUGH extra water to compensate for the milk, because after about five minutes of the simmering, I smell burning and sure enough, the water’s all boiled out and the meat/noodle concoction touching the bottoms and sides of the pot are BLACK. Ugh. Still, the rest looked salvagable, so I got the burned part out from around the good part, put some more water in and then let it continue simmering. After a few minutes, I wonder if it’s not about time for the timer to go off (my microwave doesn’t have a timer, so I use my cell phone alarm). And it’s three minutes PAST time. Didn’t hear it–possibly because I was still scraping black meat from the pot at that point. It wasn’t burned, but it’s not that great, especially since I keep finding residual burned pieces in the middle and have to fish them out.

So here it is, an hour later, and I’ve just stopped eating the worst $6 meal I’ve ever had. So what have I learned? Check the box before starting to cook to make sure I have everything. Make sure there’s enough liquid when simmering stuff that it doesn’t burn (need to remember this with rice as well). Stay better attuned to the progress of the cooking, even though it’s tempting to back to reading and TV. Check the timer more often. Just go buy already-made food instead of trying to make it myself, since I obviously can’t. Back to Ramen noodles for me…can’t screw those up.

(In my flimsy defense, I usually do make Hamburger Helper with reasonable competency. In this case, it was the question of the milk substitution that really screwed everything up.)

Dad is telling me roach stories in my previous post.

Had to stop three times to let the ROACHES cross the road. Like you do for deer in other parts of civilization. [near Houston]

I haven’t seen any THAT big. :p But let me tell you about me and the roaches. It’s possible that I had never seen a roach before I moved here. If I had, it didn’t really make a big impression on me. A few weeks ago, the apartment managers put a flyer on everyone’s door saying the exterminators were coming, and had we seen any roaches. At that point, I really hadn’t. So I said so and didn’t really think about it anymore, assuming that everyone who had talked about there being a lot of roaches in Texas was just making it up. (I’m delusional about things like this, seriously…doesn’t matter how often people tell me about bad stuff, I refuse to believe it’s possible, or that it’ll happen to me. I guess everyone’s like that to some degree.) Anyway.

The DAY AFTER the exterminators were here, I see this little black thing in the corner by the door. So I go and inspect it, and I seriously, seriously thought it was a cricket. Which, okay, noisy…but not bad. I helped it out the door. I swear! Then a day or two later, these things were everywhere. (That’s an exaggeration. I still have not seen more than one or two at a time. They come in waves, like a trained army.) And it dawned on me, that wait. I wonder if these are the infamous roaches. But they can’t be! Because these things jump and fly, and roaches don’t jump and fly, do they? DO THEY?! So I had to look them up on the internet to discover that yes, roaches jump and fly, and yes, these are roaches. I felt so dumb, having to look up roaches on the internet.

I figure the exterminators chased them out of everyone else’s apartment, and they came to mine, since I hadn’t had any yet. I spent one night going around and stomping on them, but I got tired of that quickly, especially since they’re kinda tough and jump really fast. So now I have Black Flag to spray them with (it’s kind of fun, actually….they try to jump away, and then they just go limp and flip over on their back–pretty powerful stuff), and some poison thingies. I think I need to get new poison thingies, though. After I put those out I didn’t see any more critters for a couple of weeks, but now they’re starting to resurface. They haven’t been truly bothersome…just annoyances. Well, except the one that jumped on me last night. First time that’s happened. *shudder*

But not much. Mostly, there’s this one:

This is perhaps only exciting to me, but I love Chinese food, and I’ve always been too afraid to make it. And of course, I’m still too afraid to actually start from scratch, but I found a frozen General Tso’s Chicken meal at the local grocery store. I got with some trepidation, because I’ve tried frozen Chinese meals before, and they have sucked. But this one is actually really good! And I did the rice myself. Aside from some unfortunate close calls at boiling over, it went well. (I am so impatient, I can hardly stand to actually stay in the kitchen while things are cooking, and rice apparently boils over in the time it takes me to get from the stove to the computer and back again.) In related news, the people who take pictures of food for menus and ads? Have my admiration, because I took about ten pictures before I got one that looked half as good as it looks in real life.

And here’s a couple of others I took a while ago.

If you haven’t seen Baylor, it’s beautiful. I only have this one shot of it, for some reason. I should go take more. It’s even more beautiful when you compare it with the rest of Waco, which is…less beautiful. This is the oldest section of campus–the building on the right is the home of the English department.

And this is my new favorite highway interchange, between I-35E and I-635 at the north edge of Dallas. You can’t see it too well from here (it’s hard to take picture while driving, okay?), but there are so many sets of bridges. All the bridge columns are engraved with that design, with the Texas lone star on it. It’s pretty impressive.