I just spent a half hour playing fetch with my cat…

…and it was terribly relaxing. Everyone should have a pet to play with.

Let’s see, what to update since the last time I wrote?

1. I got an assistantship! Yay!

It’s the one I wrote about earlier, working under the editor of Design Research Quarterly. The articles are pretty interesting, so even if the writing is dreadful in the pure form and it takes me five hours and three Aleve to edit one article, it’ll be worth it. The experience I get in the editing/publishing end will come in handy later on if I ever hope to have a position in the publication side of research (and the idea of me being a knowledge gatekeeper of that sort is both hilarious and intriguing). I also think it’ll make me an even stronger writer, also very necessary to surviving grad school.

And yes, because I’m materially minded, a partial tuition waiver. It’s only a 25% position, so they only waive 9 hours. I’m taking 11. I pay 2 hours worth and fees. The fees are what really suck. Still, it gives me about $2500 back out of the $4200 for the semester plus a (tiny) stipend. That’s nothing to sneeze at for something that’s in theory only 10 hours of work a week.

2. I’ve been sort of running stats study groups for our quantitative methods class. It’s more fun than I thought it would be because I find that I actually still remember and understand this stuff from way back in 2004 when I took undergrad stats. Also very helpful when you take into account that Sherkat tends to jump steps like crazy and assume we can keep up. So far I have been but I definitely have to remember to ask him to slow down and explain things when we get to the higher end stats formulas that I haven’t really dealt with or used. Regardless, the groups help me cement my knowledge, figure out alternate ways of explaining what’s going on, and it’s a great sort of ‘intro’ to teaching. Most of the tutoring I’ve done up to this point has been one-on-one, so the group environment is nice.

Is it weird I like statistics? I remember being the girl in high school who cringed through her math courses. I survived them and did well because I studied judiciously not because I was “good” at math.

3. I’ve been cooking a lot more since I moved down here. Some of it is out of necessity. I’m hungrier because I’m running around like crazy. But I also need the leftovers. I can’t eat out as much as I used to be able to; I really miss those nice big paychecks from CMR. Alas.

4. I have some thoughts on bootstrapping in discussions of prejudice that I kind of want to talk about at some point. When I’m not in the middle of sauteeing pierogis.

5. Also have thoughts on the use of the tyrant figure and anti-establishment coding vs. establishment frameworks in video games, also to be talked about later. See reason above.

Hypocrisy, Now

I’m not exactly the Queen of Dropping Things, but seriously, people, learn to let shit go. Mostly it’s a waste of time and energy harping on the small stuff. It’s mostly a waste of time and energy harping on the big stuff too (unless you have lots of money/fame to gain a mouthpiece and national attention), I realize, but far more worth it.

Also, for the record, sometimes reality has absolutely nothing to do with what is perceived as reality. If perceived reality was truth, then a lot of us in the US would be a hell of a lot economically better off than we really are. Also the continents of South America, Africa, Asia, Antarctica, and Australia wouldn’t exist. Oh, and Canada too. Canada’s gone, except for the tv studios. Those are relocated to California.

And unconnected to the random real life stuff above, I’m watching Stir of Echoes: Homecoming on the Scifi channel and they’re showing promos for The Invasion. As much as I’m ‘meh’ on yet another remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, seeing the promos every five minutes has me pondering a little about how a lot of classic horror movies run to this weird sort of normative progressiveness.

Like one of my all time, hands down, favorite movies: Night of the Living Dead, the original Romero 1968 version, with one of my all time favorite movie heroes of all time: Ben (played by Duane Jones). This movie, no matter how many times I see it, still gives me nightmares. But Night of the Living Dead works on more than just the horror level; Romero has always been all about the social commentary. Night of the Living Dead portrays a strong, intelligent commanding black man as the hero. At one point, one of the film’s more odious white racist characters, Harry, locks Ben outside to be eaten by the dead and Ben still outlives him. And even deeper than that, you have issues of male pride/territorialism (”You’re the boss down there and I’m the boss up here.” — said by Ben, so it doubles as a pretty bold statement about segregation and racism for 1968), the urging of dependency in females who are in relationships, and even the obsessive need to consume.

Though if you really want to talk about zombie consumption, there’s no better movie than Dawn of the Dead. Yes, the original 1979 movie (the sequel was fun, but it was vapid, Synder lost all of the deeper meaning). Not only do you have some hilarious 70s clothing styles, but you have a pregnant woman who is essentially the hero (also, Tom Savini and Ken Foree for the excessively geeky), discussions of abortion, of apathy, of immigration, and of the conspicuous consumption of zombies on escalators. Zombies on escalators!

I haven’t seen the third in the trilogy, Day of the Dead since the 1980s, so I don’t remember the social commentary from this one as clearly, though I believe there was a lot going on in terms of social programming and closed door politics. Maybe I should rewatch this.

And then of course you have the newest, fourth movie, Land of the Dead, which not only has Dario Argento’s daughter (Asia) in it, but is also one of the most blatantly Marxist movies I’ve seen in a long time. After all, the dead are the majority and the living are the privileged class, aren’t they? (Plus, yes, he makes this point with the living too.) There’s also a polemic on entertainment as distraction, the muck under the green, and fear tactics in internal and external populations.

I guess I sort of think of George Romero the same way I think of Wes Craven. Where Romero has always been good at including minorities using horror as a vehicle for commentary, Craven’s most famous horror series (Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream) feature female leads. As leads. Who actually don’t need to be saved. They often end up doing some saving themselves. After all, Nancy Thompson was my hero as a child when I first saw the original Nightmare on Elm Street. She reads up, she investigates, she takes shit from no one, she forces the people around her to listen, and she fights back physically and mentally. Would that all female horror heroes had her gumption.

Yes, btw, I am using the term ‘hero’ deliberately, as ‘heroine’ tends to imply a different sort of character slant. That’s changing somewhat but, still, female leads usually end up on screen to prop up their male counterparts. But that is a discussion for another day when I’m less moody. And have chocolate. Stupid lack of chocolate.

Anyway, to get back to my original point about Invasion of the Body Snatchers… Essentially, I watch those promos and wonder if they’ll include a lot of the coding the first movie did. I know the biggest reading is probably “BETTER DEAD THAN RED!” but there’s a lot more stuff going on in that movie too. Such as the hints that the pods are being supplied by immigrants as a possible alternate reading. Or the way you have these two very interesting ideas of conformity contrasting, one that is perceived as good and current, and the other that is encroaching and evil, and it costs sanity (points) to try and reconcile the two. That’s just plain weird no matter how you want to read the allegory of the film. I guess all films, at their heart, are preaching “my way not their way,” but each way differs. You just get it a lot more explicitly in the original Body Snatchers, as the standard conformity is changed and sanity is lost for the lead characters.

Anyway. I saw Stardust yesterday and it was good, even though I went a bit ‘hmm’ at some of the changes from the book. (I have the hard bound edition with illustrations. Signed. One of my prized possessions, yes, sirree.) Though for me, Michelle Pfeiffer really carried the movie (with some help from Robert DeNiro). Part of this was because of the changes they made and part of it was that they (both Pfeiffer and DeNiro) really looked like they were having fun on screen in a way the leads Charlie Cox and Claire Danes didn’t. Still, I recommend it.