The Scary-Crayon review of The White Bone is finally online! Granted, I sacrificed sleep to get it done -- not that I could've slept anyway, as fucking hot as it is in here -- but I came through. Go me. It's a fairly lengthy review, but I think it's pretty good. Anyway, enjoy! And do comment.

I've been having ideas for books to write like crazy this week. Will I get any writing done this weekend? We shall see!

Hey all. Sorry I haven't gotten that Scary-Crayon review of The White Bone finished yet -- as you can tell from the previous posts (if you haven't read them, go do that), my mind's been pretty occupied this week with all manner of depressing and complex thoughts. You can rest easy, though, at least for the moment -- my "Street Fighter II: V" DVD box set showed up yesterday, and I can't go to my grave without first watching all 29 episodes. Rah. Anyway, hopefully I'll have that review up tonight, along with a long-awaited addition to SC this weekend. No promises regarding that one's completion, but we can hope... and if nothing else, hopefully I'll finish up a new food article for next week or something.

In looking over these graduate programs that fail to captivate me, I'm kind of disappointed that I haven't seen any Philosophy and English/Creative Writing dual degree programs. That would excite me. And teaching philosophical fiction? That would be fun. But I don't see anything like that available. Sigh.

Maybe this weekend I will make substantial progress on my illustrated book as well! Here's hoping. Anyway, gotta get ready for work. Ja.

Did I mention how fucking hot it is in here?!?

Looking inward and examining certain correlations regarding both my feelings and opinions of people I've known, I've discovered something rather curious: it seems that the amout of mistrust I harbor for a person increases in proportion to the intensity of my affection for that person. This rarely holds for my long-distance/online relationships with people -- as much as I like some of my online acquaintances, the kind of passion of which I speak here is, I think, usually reserved for relationships in which a certain physical proximity (or at least the potential for it) exists (or existed) -- but this relationship between affection and mistrust has held true on several occasions in my past. (more...)

I think I'll take the GRE this summer. Still probably won't apply to grad school in December, though -- with the exception of creative writing, there's not really a subject I'm interested in studying in-depth right now (in an academic setting, anyway; I do enjoy philosophy, frex, but I've grown weary of academic pretension, even though I'm fairly good at affecting it). Maybe that'll change in the coming years (assuming I'm around for them, which seems highly unlikely), but in the meantime at least a good score on the GRE would bolster my self-esteem in the company of these hot-shot academic achievers. At least then I'll have something with which to nurse my intellectual pride when those people shun me for the company of "smarter" and more well-to-do individuals!

And now, a list of books/literature I've read in the past month and a half:

No Exit and Three Other Plays by Jean-Paul Sartre
The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
Carrie Pilby by Caren Lissner
In the Palm of Darkness by Mayra Montero
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Marco's Millions by William Sleator
The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy
What Dreams May Come by Richard Matheson

I started reading The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe this morning. It's not bad so far! And hopefully I'll have a review of The White Bone up on Scary-Crayon either tonight or tomorrow night. Anyway, ja!

Okay, so I don't feel like such an idiot tonight. I went back, took a few more of those practice GRE tests, and kicked major ass. My few wrong answers, with the exception of straight guesses on analogies with words I didn't know, consisted of careless shit like me not paying attention to the question's directions or in fact not seeing the question at all because I somehow scrolled past it. And since, hopefully, the latter wouldn't happen during the test due to the pencil-and-paper format (though I recall having made a similar mistakes on a past test and having had to correct for the error by erasing and shifting all of my answers down one) and I'd be a little more attentive to the former difficulty during the actual exam, I think I'd do fairly well. (more...)