In general, watch it, but especially watch it tonight. I’m in the audience. In the seats, center/stage right, about halfway back. And let me tell you, somewhere around 98% of the dances are fantastic, and the other 2% are still pretty good.

More later.

I’m working on various posts about various things, but I don’t know how long it’ll take me to actually get them finished and posted, so I figured I’d throw up a quickie update for those of you wondering how my crazy move to LA is going.

• I’m in LA! Yay! Safe, fun trip all around.
• I love it here. The weather is gorgeous, there’s cool stuff everywhere, stores, restaurants, theatres, beaches, mountains, the whole bit.
• I love the people here! And by “the people here” I mean the Craws and the other people in their church, who have been very welcoming (to the point of letting me stay with them while I apartment-hunt, even!). And my friend Lis in Sherman Oaks.
• I am still apartment-hunting, but I have a bunch of leads I’m going to call up tomorrow and hopefully get something nailed down early this week.
• Also still job-hunting, but I’m expanding my search beyond universities, and I think I have a few good possibilities.
• Mostly, I’m just still so happy every time I wake up and realize where I am. So there’s that.

Here’s an example of something I’ve been seeing a lot lately. A book or a blog post or whatever will refer to a perhaps lesser-known author/filmmaker/musician/book/film, etc., with the construction: “a Japanese film of 1966 called Godzilla vs. Monster Zero.” That happens to be the one I’m looking at right now, but I’ve also seen ones like “a 19th century British novelist named Elizabeth Gaskell.” Typically, the assumption when writers use this seems to me to be that the thing they’re about to mention won’t be known to most of their audience. For example, in the book with the Godzilla example, four lines later, the writer mentions “Beethoven sonatas” but doesn’t feel the need to say “sonatas by a German composer named Ludwig van Beethoven.” Apparently because everyone should know who Beethoven is. And I agree that Beethoven is, and should be, better known than the Godzilla movie. But I would still say “the 1966 Japanese film Godzilla vs. Monster Zero” instead. To me, that contains all the same information with less condescension. It gives the object a more concrete existence by virtue of a definite rather than an indefinite one as well as by firmly connecting it to its name (it is Godzilla vs. Monster Zero rather than just being called that).

Do those two ways of phrasing the same thing have connotatively different meanings to anyone but me? Or am I just being overly bothered by something meaningless?

I know I’ve been lax on the old blog lately. I claim a combination of schoolwork, socializing, nearing-graduation stress, returning television shows, and generally not much interesting going on. Oh, and also the part where I’ve gotten in Twitter a lot more and am post one-off thoughts there instead of collecting them together into a blog-sized post. That gets most everything I want to say out of my system so it doesn’t end up here, which can be good or bad, I guess, depending on how you look at it. The socializing has been largely responsible for my not being around and live-blogging American Idol. Various people have wondered what’s going on with me, though, so here’s a bulleted update.

• American Idol - I’ve been ragging on Carly a lot, but honestly, I was pretty shocked when she went home instead of Jason. I’ve also supported Jason mostly throughout the show, but that was a trainwreck of a performance on his part, and I think he’s pretty well proven that, much to my disappointment, he’s a one-trick pony. So America got that one way wrong. For me, though, David Cook has it locked. Which means he’ll probably get voted off next. Just my luck.
• School - In case you didn’t catch the edit to my post about the oral exam, I did pass it. Which is a major yay. Actually, it was sort of enjoyable - a conversation about books and film with really smart people. :) Except one professor kept asking me about Faulkner even though I admitted to never reading any Faulkner. Guess I know what’s next on my reading list! And a friend and I gave a joint presentation in Literary Criticism yesterday which went surprisingly well. And now I just have two seminar papers left, and I’m fairly comfortable with them, so stress-level has fallen exponentially in the last two days.
• Post-Grad Plans - My current plans are to take a couple of weeks after graduation, maybe spend a week here hanging out with friends minus finals week stress and a week at home, then move to Los Angeles. I’m looking for jobs at USC or UCLA (not teaching; administrative), or pretty much anywhere out there that will pay me to do something I can do. ;) I mostly just want to live in a big city for a while, at least, and LA won out over New York due to climate.
• Television - Most of the TV shows are back from the writer’s strike now, which caught me by surprise, a bit - I had gotten used to my DVR NOT filling up every week. ;) The fact that I found the writer’s strike a bit of a relief probably means I’m following too many shows, but I can’t figure out which ones to give up. And the down side is that I ended up picking up a bunch of Bravo reality shows during the strike, and now I don’t want to give those up either. Good thing most of them are short. Anyway, the big television news around here is that Battlestar Galactica is back! After marathoning S3 on DVD, my friends and I jumped straight into the fourth and final season, and it is frakking amazing. If you’re not watching this show, get the DVDs and start. Don’t start in the middle.
• Gaming - GTA IV came out last night at midnight, and I went and got it. At midnight. Only time I’ve ever done that for a game, though I’ve been to midnight movie premieres. One. Harry Potter. Anyway. I wasn’t able to stay awake for more than a couple of hours gaming once I got home (I’m getting old, what can I say?), but it’s pretty sweet. Graphics are beautiful, Liberty City is HUGE. I was afraid that it’d seem small after the three-city-plus-desert of San Andreas, but no. It’s ginormous, and with so much stuff going on that I’ve repromised myself never, ever to drive in New York City (on which Liberty City is based). It’s craziness. I also used Amazon.com gift certificates to upgrade to Gold on Xbox Live, so I’m set for multiplayer, once I can tear myself away from the single-player campaign.
• Socializing - It’s starting to hit me that I’m leaving here in like a month, and though I feel confident in the strength of the friendships I’ve made over the past two years (and the power of Facebook) that I’ll keep in contact with most of my friends, I have been trying to spend as much time as possible with them all before I leave. And I’m at that place where I’m glad to be almost done with school, and I’m very glad to be leaving Waco, but I’m not at all glad about leaving all the people here. I know everyone goes through that every time we change life situations, but that doesn’t make it any easier.

So that’s pretty much my life right now.

I won’t be liveblogging American Idol this week due to being on Spring Break at a friend’s house off South Padre Island where there is no internet. We’re all at the library now doing some much-needed e-mail catch-up, but I’ve been surprised by how little I’ve missed being online, especially since I’m normally online something like ten hours a day. Ah well. We’ve had other things to keep us busy. Even though it’s been a little chilly to do much beach stuff. We’re going to try to go today, but we’re all wearing sweatshirts. :) Anyway, just wanted to give y’all a heads up so you didn’t think I was dead when I missed American Idol tonight.

Competition! Competition! I’m excited. And I just finished watching all the episodes of Australian Idol I had downloaded, and the right person won that (well, I would’ve been happy if either of the two finalists had won), so even though the two shows are unrelated at this point, I’m optimistic for American Idol. Which may not be a great thing. But we’ll see.

I’ve tried on and off to crosspost entries from my blog to my Livejournal, but I keep slacking off. So I installed a crossposting plugin that should do it automatically. It means that everything I post on my blog will also get posted on LJ, and I can’t post anything to LJ that’s not posted on the blog, which is sort of annoying. But anyway, I think it’ll be better than being so completely absent on LJ that I don’t keep up with my friends, which is what’s been happening. So if you’re subscribed to both my blog and LJ feeds (or my blog feed on LJ), you can pick one or the other, because they’re going to be identical from here on out. Unless I change my mind, in which case, I will tell you. In general, the blog is probably going to look prettier, because that’s where I write and preview posts. Just sayin’.

LJ people: Hi! I imported my blog posts to LJ, so if you scroll back, you should see most of them. I imported them as private (because I wanted to make sure it was working), and then switched most of them to public, but left a few that were no longer relevant or whatever. Just in case anyone starts comparing blog and LJ, that’s why posts before today aren’t necessarily identical. Also, any internal links in the posts are going to be to the blog and not the LJ.

Facebook people: Hi also! I’ve had my blog on my profile as an RSS feed for a while, but I decided to be a shameless self-promoter and use Facebook’s “import blog” feature to make them into notes. If it completely overwhelms y’all’s newsfeeds, let me know and I’ll do something different.

Now, theoretically, when I hit “publish,” this will also post on LJ and Facebook. We’ll see.

It’s probably not generally known here, but about ten years ago I was massively into figure skating. Not doing it, just watching it. Anyway, I don’t follow it closely anymore, but once in a while it’s on and I watch it. Since I don’t pay much attention to it these days, I didn’t realize the Nationals were last weekend, so I missed most of them; I did happen to catch the men’s, though, featuring the continuing rivalry between last year’s champion Evan Lysacek and the champion before him, Johnny Weir. I’ve seen Weir around for several years, and never cared for him much, but he seems to have matured a lot this year or something, and I liked him better. But that’s by the by.

I had friends over on Sunday night and taped the end of the competition and didn’t watch it until tonight. And discovered that Weir and Lysacek TIED their overall score. Dude. That doesn’t happen. They score these things to the hundredth of a point, and they TIED. Now, Lysacek was given the championship because he scored higher in the free skate (the second program; they did the short program earlier in the week). Now, I think there is sort of precedent for this, because didn’t Oksana Baiul win the 1994 Olympics over Nancy Kerrigan because her artistic mark was a tenth of a point higher than Nancy’s even though their overall score was the same? (Nancy had a tenth higher on technical marks, IIRC.) That was before the scoring system changed, though, so the scores weren’t calculated nearly so finely. In any case, I’m really glad I managed to catch this moment, even a week later, because wow.

I am sorry I missed the other portions of the competition, though. I love me some ice dancing these days. Exhibitions are on Saturday, so I made sure to set my timer for those.

Here are both programs, courtesy of the fine folks who upload stuff to YouTube. (Where I should probably look for the ladies’, pairs, and dancers, now that I think of it…)