Complaints

Apr. 28th, 2012 01:58 am
xifeng: (Default)
1.) Dear body, polycystic ovarian syndrome, and hormonal birth control (also possibly the new implants in Fallopian tubes): Please decide whether we're menstruating or not, and act accordingly. I am tired of finding surprises in my underwear. Either bleed normally or don't bleed, I don't care, but pick one and stick with it.

2.) Dear brain and possible undiagnosed Asperger's syndrome: Just because there is Russian history does not mean we have to read it all like a goddamn spaz. This is how we got burnt out and--No. NO. STOP FLASHING BACK TO THE LIBRARY. WE WILL BE THERE AGAIN SHORTLY, PROBABLY ON MONDAY AFTER WORK. THIS IS MANY THINGS BUT NOT TRAGIC. Also, STOP FLASHING BACK TO THE SAN ANTONIO LIBRARY BECAUSE WE'RE NOT GOING THERE EVER AGAIN. That entire period of our life more or less sucked and had like three redeeming qualities, remember?...No, we don't need to be worried about what happened to the David King biography of Trotsky. Worst-case scenario, it's been withdrawn and we'll pick it up for like $1.35 at the Friends of the Library book sale. Or, you know, on Amazon.

Speaking of Amazon. CLOSE OUT THE AMAZON TAB. CLOSE IT OUT. NOW. WE'RE NOT GETTING BOOKS THIS WEEK. WE JUST BOUGHT CLOTHES (and spent way too much, but in fairness I did need bras and some more workplace-appropriate shirts and I had the money). NO BOOKS. NO BOOKS FOR WHINY BRAINS.

...Oh, fine. FINE. If I go upstairs and read some of The Prophet Armed or whatever, will that shut you up for five minutes?

3.) Dear flist: Back later.
xifeng: (Default)
This will be brief, as X-chan is here and in any case I don't want to spend Easter weekend on the Int0rbuttz, but we were talking about my father's people. X-chan has been doing the genealogy on that side, which so far has eluded me, and I asked if she'd been able to find out anything about Great-Grandpa's parents, which is where the line ends.

Turns out, it was quite a lot. They came through New York (just as I suspected), where my great-grandfather himself was born (not in Philadelphia, as I'd always believed); X-chan was able to get census records for the 1920s and 1930s, and it turns out that quite a lot is different to what I previously thought I knew. Great-Grandpa had a sister named Violet (whom I didn't know about) who worked as a newspaper clerk for one of the Philly rags along with Louise F*******, Great-Grandma's sister, which seems to have been how my great-grandparents met. Great-Grandpa himself worked for the WPA as a timekeeper from about 1937-1940 when Grandpa was a kid.

And then there was this capper:
X-chan: Great-Grandpa's parents came through New York. His father was Russian and his mother was Hungarian. I think they married in the United States, since Great-Grandpa's father was married once before. Either it didn't take or he was a widower.
l33: I always heard it was the father who was Hungarian and the mother was a Romanian.
X-chan: Nope, Russian. Says so on the census. They might have misheard him, I guess, but...[shrugs]
l33: Huh. We are Russian. How 'bout that.

Furthering the Russian connection, Great-Grandma had another sister, Stephanie, whose husband Julian fought for the Tsarist army during the Great War, although he was an American citizen. (You could do that in those days. Why is the world so small now.) After the Revolution, he joined up with the White Russian army (the loyalist forces who battled the Red Army and ultimately lost). Then he came home and was a lawyer for 45 years, which seems rather pale next to the epic struggle of good and evil. I thought this was interesting even if I am a little embarrassed that anyone in my family fought Communism.

Bonus points if we subsequently find out that someone in my family lived in Ukraine in the 1890s and knew the family Bronshtein (and their rabble-rousing kid). I'd be surprised - the H*****es prefer colder climes - but one can fantasize.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.
xifeng: (Default)
Good things:
+ I have new earrings. The 'Mart clearanced a whole bunch of them. I don't get a discount on anything that's been clearanced, but they're cheap enough that it doesn't matter.
+ Lol-Mart only wasted 4½ hours of my time tonight, and I have short shifts until my next day off.
+ I started to get back on the wagon with eating properly.
+ The Shell station is hiring; it's nothing fancy or anything I really want, but it would be full-time, which I need, and it would be overnights, which I can deal with.
+ I have batteries for my CD player.
+ I find it really entertaining that, because I have Latin (the language) listed as an interest on my profile, the ads are all like, "MEET LATIN BEAUTIES FIND THE LATIN WOMAN OF YOUR DREAMS!!!!." Lololol.
+ Hey, [livejournal.com profile] jurhael, I don't know if you remember this Sue-we stumbled upon her a few years back during your HoND period-but she finally got sporked, if you haven't seen it yet.

And now, a MEME )
xifeng: (Default)
1.) I had to go to Hendo for an interview yesterday (I think I'm out of the running for that one; sometimes you just know), and was struck by how different the place seems to Indiana, even though it's 30-40 minutes from Evansville and there's a lot of back-and-forth between the two cities (not to mention southeastern Illinois, which is also a few miles off). I can't put my finger on it; maybe it's just the weird knowledge that oh hey, I'm in the South now. (When I was growing up, my grandparents lived in Georgia, and we visited every so often; we also spent some time in Virginia and North Carolina, vacationly speaking. Because of this, I like visiting the South and I have happy memories of it, though aspects of it are seriously borked such that I'd never want to live there.) Anyway, just off 41, there's a leasing company that offers apartments at weekly rates, which started me fantasizing, even though this raises questions (blah blah blah other obligations blah blah blah finding work gabble gabble don't seriously want to live in Kentucky I mean WHAT would I tell people rhubarb rhubarb) and if I did do it, it would seriously blow my residency status all to hell when I go back to school next year, not to mention get my University library privileges revoked until I go back. This last is The Thing That Must Not Be.

2.) For no apparent reason, I am craving the Russian Revolution SO BAD. Hello there, teenaged!l33! How are you today?
2a.) Apparently, I am still emotionally a lot more sympathetic towards Communism than I thought (O RLY???) because every time I read articles critical of the ideology, I get a little huffy in my brain. (In fairness, there's also pro-Communist stuff out there which is total glurge, and I can't stand to read that shit either.)
2b.) Clearly, I will never be grown up. OH NOES.
2c.) Conventional adulthood is for simps anyway.
2d.) Maybe I should just go down to Coyoacan one of these days like I always wanted to do and get it out of my system.
2e.) …never mind. It will probably never be out of my system. COMMUNISM: It broke my heart and part of me still loves it all the same.

3.) The other night, I had a dream that I had fallen asleep on [livejournal.com profile] duokinneas, which had absolutely no basis in reality but was v. nice all the same.

4.) Decided to crash on the couch last night with the porch door open and the fan going. Callice climbed up and snuggled up on my feet (not on the blanket, which is her preferred bed) and stayed there more or less until I woke up. My back hates me now, but it was otherwise v. pleasant.

5.) Don't have to be at work until 6:30 (but once I'm there, I have to stick it out until midnight, because we are SO BUSY at midnight, you know), and if I can get through another 5-and-a-half-hour shift tomorrow, I shall have earned my day off. Really not looking forward to tonight, though. Good thing I don't have to leave for another 4 hours.

6.) Made cabbage salad for lunch and had it with a hard-boiled egg and half an avocado and a chunk of baguette. We need more eggs now, though. Also, I need to finish some of the leftovers in the fridge. Nom nom nom. :9

7.) Need to clean up the kitchen shortly. l33 out.

Also, I'm going to forget unless I do this right now, so:
The cut, she has big letters! )
xifeng: (Livia Drusilla is disgruntled)
Nothing went right on Sunday. I slept until about 11:30 in the morning (after going to bed at 8 last night), because retail hours are fucking with my circadian rhythms. The computer was (and remains) borked, though less borked than it was earlier; I know we've been living on borrowed time with this thing, but I wish to God it would hold out long enough to let me get back on my feet and buy my own. (It's actually not the computer proper; we're having Monitor Issues, and essentially if I want to see anything at all I have to blow it up to 400x600 resolution. RETRO MANIA! [livejournal.com profile] aeromancy, I suppose this too is part of your evil plot?)

The lolmom was going to go to the store so we can get more food on account of she got paid, but on her way she stopped to mail some bills and accidentally dropped the grocery list in the mailbox with the bills. Needless to say, it was not possible to fish it out, and I had to reconstitute the entire grocery list. I am proud of her for actually remembering several of the items thereon.

I then discovered that the University in its infinite wisdom has now moved all of the back issues of Iskra, which I was going to translate for the lulz, and they seem to now be in the Lilly which means I need to provide three kinds of photo ID, a full retinal scan, and a note from the lolmom merely in order to caress them with my burning, myopic eyes. I understand the purpose here, which is to protect them since Iskra has been out of print for about a hundred years and the print run was limited and a lot of copies got destroyed for obvious reasons. Still, I wish they could protect them in a manner which causes less inconvenience for me personally. LEE: CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE.

(For the four people who don't know, Iskra was an underground Communist newspaper in the days when the Communist Party was still called the Russian Social-Democratic Party, and it was printed out of Geneva in Switzerland because there one could be relatively sure of being beyond the long arm of the Okhrana, the Tsar's secret police. Eventually, of course, the Party split right down the middle which resulted in V.I. Lenin taking his toys and going home, but not before making rude noises at Georgi Plekhanov. This was actually more complicated than it sounds, but I won't bore you unless you indicate a desire to be bored. On account of the University has most of the issues and Iskra ties in with several of my historical interests and I require a constant feed of lulz lest I get bored and burn something, and I sortakinda know Russian in the most rudimentary sense of that phrase, I would like to translate it. THERE IS NEVER ENOUGH COMMUNISM.)

I am proud of me for not putting my fist through the wall.

On the up side, the University library contains about twenty-some-odd years' worth of The Boys' Own Paper, a delightful reminder of a simpler time and place when men were men &c., in the days before subtext ruled the earth. It does not, unfortunately, have a complete run; it stops in about 1903 and resumes for a little while in the early '30s, so the issues leading up to and during the Great War aren't there. My new goal in life is to find old issues of Boys' Own and buy them up, with the intention of bequeathing the lulz to the University libraries in the event that anybody else finds them at all amusing.

So. I have interviews in Evansville tomorrow and Friday, and I'm going to Bloomington on Thursday. My existence is pastede on yey.
xifeng: (hee!)
From "The Formalist School" and "Revolution and Social Art", Literature and Revolution, tr. Rose Strunsky, and reprinted in The Modern Tradition (ed. Richard Ellmann--yes, the Joyce biographer--and Charles Feidelson, Jr).

Shklovsky's destruction of Marxism in five points reminds us very much of those articles which were published against Darwinism in the magazine "The Orthodox Review" in the good old days. If the doctrine of the origin of man from the monkey were true, wrote the learned Bishop Nikanor of Odessa thirty or forty years ago, then our grandfathers would have had distinct signs of a tail, or would have noticed such a characteristic in their grandfathers and grandmothers. Second, as everybody knows, monkeys can only give birth to monkeys. [...] Fifth, Darwinism is incorrect, because it contradicts Formalism--I beg your pardon. I meant to say the formal decisions of the universal church conferences.

OH SNAP. XD

God, I loves me some Trotskyite snark.
xifeng: (You're making Alexander the Great cry.)
If you loved me, you'd write me some Communist slash.

PLLLLLLLLZZZZZZZZ?

PLZ PLZ PLZ PLZ PLZ?

(And nobody point me to the Marx/Engels fic; I already know about it.)
xifeng: (oh noes!!!!1111oneone!!!)
There was a time when I used to have embarrassing celebrity crushes on dead Communists.

That time was, like, ten years ago, meaning that it is in the past, meaning that it is over, meaning that I am now officially too old to be thumbing through the books that date from my passionate obsession with Russian history (since cooled to mere interest) and thinking that Lev Trotsky was a total babe and that I should have gone to Mexico to see his grave while I still lived in San Antonio.

God damn me.

[EDIT: If anyone has any idea why I feel compelled to blurt my embarrassing personal issues onto TEH INTARWEBZ as though they were interesting to other people, please tell me.]

[EDIT to the EDIT: Apparently, I was so hung up on old Lev Davidovich there that when I was packing to leave this morning, I forgot my toiletry bags and now have to make a Hell-Mart run.]

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