rightangles: (little prince falling)
Every now and again, at the most random times, I get this feeling. It's faint, like a wind whisper or the scent of perfume as someone rushes by. It's this intimation of mortality, this feeling that we are all, every one of us, sitting here, spending seconds and minutes, utterly oblivious to the fact that we could die right now. That's not quite right, though. Not quite oblivious or ignorant, because we obviously know we could die any second. It's just this feeling of vulnerability, like a sitting duck, as they say. We are such insects, you and I, sitting idly around, just waiting for some big oaf to squash us into oblivion. A stroke, a heart attack, an accident. I don't think about this often. I'm not obsessed, and I'm not Emily Dickinson. But like I said, every once in a while it washes over me, and I get so scared and aware. It's so troubling.

Now, to lighter topics! I watched It's Complicated tonight. It's a romantic comedy with Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin, and Steve Martin. Meryl and Alec were married once, now divorced, and Steve Martin is Meryl's new love interest. As I'm sure you've figured out, Meryl and Alec end up having an affair, rekindling their old love, blah blah blah. The movie starts out so wonderfully, and indeed, the first hour and fifteen minutes of the movie is great. It's light and funny, with excellent performances, and it's heart-warming, in the way true love can be. But then something happens, something shifts, and it's no longer cute. Meryl suddenly pulls away, she becomes an unsympathetic character, and she never really redeems herself. She spends the last half hour repeating to everyone who will listen that there is no longer a spark between her and Alec, but we've just spent an hour and a half of movie time, which is like ten years' worth of real life time, seeing this great spark, and so nothing computes and it doesn't work out. It's annoying, and I hate good movies that are ruined by idiotic endings. Fail, people! Fail!

I did learn, however, that Hunter Parrish in Blu-ray HD is probably my new favorite thing ever. Yum.

In other news, I'm still having this on-again, off-again lower back pain, mostly on the right side. When it's actively hurting, I'm sure it's a kidney stone; when there's no pain, I'm sure it's just muscular, from the way I sit or the way I sleep or the way I stand or all three put together. It doesn't feel like the pain I had before my last kidney stone, and I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that stones are painless when they're in the kidneys (even if Rae Jean tells me they're not). It's a dull ache, nothing sharp, and certainly nothing that would put a man in the hospital. So if it is a stone, it's still hanging out in my kidney. It needs to stay there, because I'm not in the mood for the excruciating pain I had last year. Or two years ago. How many years ago was that, anyway?

Otherwise, not much to report. I wrote a little bit tonight, half of the next scene in Eternity, and I finished the Cunningham review, so that's a load off my back. I really, really need to set some unalterable deadlines for this grad school business, but I'm bad at that. I am taking the GRE Lit test in something like three weeks, so I should probably start looking over the test prep book for that in the near future. I should also probably pick the schools that I'm applying to, and get out some emails to professors so they know to expect a slew of requests from me in a month or two. I just wish there were some guarantee, some consolation prize, because knowing that I could go through all this trouble and not get in anywhere, that I will probably not get in anywhere, is so discouraging.

Ah, life. I miss my youth, the days when everything was guaranteed and every pain I had disappeared after a single night's rest and I didn't have to do anything or think about anything or worry about anything. I had heartburn, bad heartburn, for the first time a few days ago. Heartburn! Heartburn!!! Can you imagine? Heartburn!!!

I just... I dunno. When did we all get so old?
rightangles: (little prince)
As usual, I find deadlines looming. Ergo, also as usual, I find myself coming up with to-do lists and needs-to-be-dones that'll never keep. On the bright side, I have a nice stretch of days without work coming up, and I hope to use those days to accomplish quite a few things, including but not limited to a review of The Salt Ecstasies by James White, a completed reading of Michael Cunningham's By Nightfall, at least two more scenes of Eternity, and the completion of cursory world-building for Fourteen Lines. I still don't know whether to say Fourteen Lines or "Fourteen Lines," since I'm not sure yet if it's going to turn out to be a novella or a (long) short story. I'm leaning towards the former, though, which is why I opted to italicize in the penultimate sentence. I'm not entirely sure if I can use 'penultimate' in this way, meaning "second to last one" rather than "second from the end," but who knows and who cares! I'm an English rebel!

I caught up on Weeds tonight. I don't know about that show anymore. I loved the first three seasons, tolerated the fourth, was entertained by the fifth, but now, I'm finding it slow and dull. Not in the sense that nothing happens, just dull in the sense that I don't care about any of it. If I didn't love Mary-Louise Parker and think Hunter Parrish was so incredibly hot, I probably wouldn't even bother. The storyline is just veering so wildly out of control. It's like they're desperate to do something different, something bigger, every season now... which sucks, because I liked it just fine when it was the story of a mom who happens to deal drugs on the side. Success gets to your head and then you're effed. So sad.

This is my first official post with the new Dreamwidth journal instead of LiveJournal. I feel a little odd, like I'm leaving behind so many people on LiveJournal. But that's simply not true. I went through my friends list, and the only people whose journal I'll miss are [lj] orpheus78, [lj] fattymcgayerson, [lj] septicidal, and [lj] james0289. I'll miss a few people who don't update their journals much (I'm looking at you, [lj] notclever908), but that's it! And I'll still read them through my OpenID, so I won't even really miss them. And since the only people who comment on my entries nowadays are Poppy and RaeJean, and they've both created Dreamwidth journals, it should be okay. I need to stop feeling like this is some life-changing event and just roll with it. I think too much.

One thing, though, is that I wish I had a better tag system developed over the past six years' worth of entries. At some point, I intend to go back through the tags I did use and work them into a better heirarchy, since Dreamwidth supports multi-level tagging systems, but still, working with half-baked dough still leaves you with half-baked final products, you know? (I'm not entirely sure what the Hell 'half-baked dough' is, but shut up and roll with it.) I've started to convert a few of the tags, and I'll start working on tagging better now, but... yeah. Sad day. I was tempted to start a whole new journal from scratch when I made the switch, but I can't bear to part with the past six years. There were some good times, there were some bad times. Yadda yadda yadda.

I have a dull headache, so I think I may go find something to eat. I had macaroni earlier, but apparently it was not enough. Or this isn't a hunger headache, which is also possible. I generally feel pretty shitty all the time nowadays, so it's hard to tell when a blah feeling is something that I can fix easily or when it's something I need to learn to live with.

I should really update my [personal profile] friendlystars, at some point. Linking to that journal just made me realize that Semagic is not entirely Dreamwidth friendly, since I can't get my friends to load, etc. I should look into this. I'll do that now.