Seasonal Affective Disorder

I like to go for walks alone at night. I'm pretty sure I've already mentioned this about ten million times, but I'll just repeat it once again. The first semester I was at USC, my drawing class was at night, and the professor told us to go out, pick a spot on campus, and draw it, because the lighting is much more dramatic at night. I promptly became addicted to wandering around at night, because everything is so pretty, and the sun doesn't get in my eyes, and people are way, way less likely to randomly speak to me. But mostly it's the "everything is so pretty" part.

Also, I need a lot of exercise. Like, a completely ridiculous amount. Walking and running is time I use to think. During the summer, when I was at the coast house and had nothing to do but study and work on the house, I used to go for a 7-mile run in the morning and a 9-mile walk at night. This is also the reason why I feel I need a dog - it makes an excellent excuse. Normal people do not need two 7-mile walks per day. People look at you funny when you tell them that you do. But, of course, it's totally not me that needs a 7-mile walk, it's the dog. Really. I feel, like, totally put-upon that I went and got a big dog that needs soooo much exercise.

You see where this is going, right? See, winter here was great for me because I could go out once it got dark at, like 5:30 and be out for hours and hours. It was fantastic. I could walk 12 miles in the dark and be back before 9 pm. But now the sun doesn't even go down until 9:15 pm, and it doesn't get dark enough for me to go out until nearly 10 pm. And, although I don't have classes anymore, I still have to get up at a reasonable hour because I have meetings to go to and research to do for my dissertation. I am going quietly insane from lack of exercise because I cannot justify staying out until 1 am every night. And the sun rises at 5:10, so morning isn't any good either. I'm not willing to get up at 4 am. Bring back the ridiculously short days, dammit!

Psychological Experiments

Today's Skype conversation (my parents Skype every Sunday):

Dad: I saw a newspaper article a few days ago that was rather puzzling.
Dad: It was about celebrity moms talking about what books they read their children, and what their favorite lines were.
Dad: not once was "String, or nothing!" mentioned, and no one mentioned "Three rings for the elven kings under the sky" Isn't that strange? What else would you read your children?
Antares: That is odd. I thought "String, or nothing!" was everyone's favorite line.
Antares: but you didn't read them to David.
Antares: Did you experiment on us? Was he the control? Are you going to write up the results?

My dad seriously did read me Lord of the Rings when I was little. We started with The Hobbit when I was in kindergarten, and finished Return of the King when I was in fifth grade. Apparently, I could not pronounce the orc's names, so we used shorter nicknames for them. Watching the movies years later was a totally weird experience - I remembered the name Strider, for example, but Aragorn meant nothing to me. David doesn't read anything that isn't standard Hero's Journey fantasy/sci-fi. I bet this is why. Childhood Lord of the Rings deprivation.

As awesome as that part might have been - seventeen years later, I am still bitter about being given a copy of Dogsbody, and then, a week later, being told that I couldn't have a puppy until I was all grown up (that is, like, a million years away when you're seven. Not to mention I am grown up now and I still can't have one.) If my parents complain about the quality of the care they receive in old age, I intend to remind them of that little incident. They did give me a telescope when I was 18, but I have stewed in my bitterness for 17 years now, especially since I can no longer name my dog Sirius. So much repressed rage.

Get Over Yourself

I was in class the other day (my LAST CLASS, incidentally) and my professor actually mentioned this, and I was overjoyed, because it's been one of my pet peeves for years now.

I understand that underdog academic disciplines seek validation. I do. I used to be an art student, and I know perfectly well everyone thinks artists are a bunch of navel-gazers who never say anything worth thinking about. Do you know why? Because we use absurdly inflated language to validate ourselves. Academic disciplines, especially the liberal arts ones, are under the impression that no one takes their ideas seriously, and so they use inflated language to encourage people to think of them as more important than they are.

Really, it does liberal arts disciplines a disservice. If you cannot make yourself understood, what is the point of any of your work? "Accessible" is an insult within the academic community, but if you aren't accessible to the general public, what good is your work? Certainly, you can respond to academic peers who use the same sort of inflated language, but who is going to read your paper, and what good is it to the population in general? And if you think your idea needs inflated language to justify its existence, maybe you should question whether you even need to say it in the first place.

AUGH

How did it get to be the last day of classes so soon?

Okay, I guess technically I have been here for nearly 8 months, and really that's a long time, although it doesn't feel like it. And the exam period lasts until mid-June. And I do have to spend the summer here writing my dissertation, so that's another four months I can stay here. But still. It will be at least another year and a half before I ever have class again, assuming I get into a PhD program that soon, or ever. And I've spent almost the past 20 years in school, and, you know, I really like school, and it's the only thing I know I'm good at, so you will excuse me if I clutch my head and reel a bit.

Geekery

Since my family's hobby is to annoy the living hell out of each other, I spend quite a lot of time trying to trick my dad into watching things he will hate. I consider this fair payback for the fact that since I let my dad use my computer in December, I seem to have Galaxina on my hard drive.

Anyway, this week, I thought I would attempt once again to talk him into watching House M.D., even though I know he would hate it, because there is very little other damage I can do from over here. And I thought I would do it by telling him that House is based on Sherlock Holmes, because my dad is completely obsessed with Holmes.

You know what you shouldn't do? You shouldn't engage with geeks on their own ground. Because he somehow hijacked my discussion and I got dragged away into a terrible world where everyone likes Basil Rathbone's Holmes but the guy who plays Watson is totally doing it wrong, and Dad didn't like Jeremy Brett's Holmes at first until he reread the books and realized he was actually playing the character very close to the way he was written, and the ones with Peter Cushing are just fantastic, and incidentally, why is Seven Percent Solution out of print, because that movie is probably the best one, and have I read the books with Joseph Bell, or the ones by David Pirie, I would really like those, and oh my God I'm sorry I ever said a word. It didn't stop until I found him a copy of Seven Percent Solution on Amazon UK (it is not out of print here, and sells for less than five pounds, as opposed to the $100 that they charge on Amazon US, because for some reason the British are better at DVDs, and that is part of the reason why I intend to stay here) and told him I was buying it and having it sent to him.

So yeah. Learn from my mistake and do not let someone else defeat you with geekery.