Cathryn

So, Irish Literature and Culture? The class where I handed in a crappy final paper that narrowly made the minimum required length, was padded with quotes, and just barely had a central thesis tying together the individual discussions of works that I pretty much just crapped out as I went along and didn't even proofread, because I was so pissed off about being assigned a seven to ten page paper at the last possible minute during finals period in a class that was a waste of time anyway? Oh, and also the grade for that paper was one of, like, three grades actually contributing to the final grade in the class, and the other two grades were B papers that were definitely way better than that one?

. . . I got a B for that class.

My GPA and I are not complaining, but man, I don't get it. I expected, like, CONSEQUENCES for blowing that paper off the way I did, and I was fine with that. I'm not really a fan of getting grades I don't deserve, good or bad. I'm kinda used to my papers getting better grades than I expect - not to toot my own horn, but that'll happen in classes where you're one of very few people who seem to know how to write a damn paper, or have any talent for it, though I would presume that's less of a factor in higher level English classes - but this one was such a throwaway, I thought for sure it would be different.

Only grade left is the WWI&II class. I give up even trying to guess what I'll get there. The grading for that class is a lot more quantitative, since it's about facts, not analysis, and the professor included multiple choice questions as a major part of testing, but I'm so turned around now I don't know what to think.

Attention universe: Quit being an asshole and killing off people's pets. JESUS.

In other news, I spotted the following on the side of a truck for an odd jobs company, complete with quote marks:

"No job to small."

Except for proofreading.

Good thing about weather so bad that classes get cancelled:

Classes are cancelled.

Bad thing about weather so bad that classes are cancelled:

It had to happen today, which was meant to be the last meeting of my WWI & II class before our final next week. This class meets once a week, and this semester has already been broken up a lot in the last month or so because of holidays. So now we don't get whatever information we were going to get to round out a test I was ALREADY nervous about, we don't get confirmation on what to expect essay questions for, and I know e-mail exists but I'm not so sure about my professor. (That he knows e-mail exists, I mean; I know he exists.) I love the guy, but he still refers to photocopies as mimeos, for god's sake. I'm not gonna hold my breath hoping for an e-mail.

And while I'm posting, have an INFORMAL POLL.

A take-home essay exam should be:

A. Something that takes roughly as much time at home as it would in class.

B. A seven-to-ten page paper requiring discussion of SIX different texts on one of two poorly-taught topics, disallowing outside sources and with instructions insisting that it be a formally written academic paper. Oh, and you should definitely spring this on your students one week before it's due, after they've already carefully planned out their finals study schedule.

If you chose B, congratulations! You and my Irish Literature and Culture professor can go be douchebags together, preferably far away from me so I don't give in to the temptation to soak him in gasoline and light a match!

Fucking BASTARD.

From the userinfo description of a Torchwood/Doctor Who RPG:

This universe is starting out clean by being completely canon. [. . .] To get the game rolling, I'm going to start by saying Children of Earth never happened.

DOES NOT COMPUTE.

. . . you wanna try that again, Google?

First: In reference to my last post, you guys are awesome and I love you.

Second: Supernatural!

( 5x03, Free to Be You and Me. Titles like that are so awkward, I'm never sure which of the multiple tiny words are okay to capitalize when there aren't any others that would be capital. )

Oh my god, academia.

On the one hand, this article I am reading is a serious discussion of the evidence regarding a fundamental part of the personality of a major figure in the Aesthetic movement.

On the other hand, it's rehashing century-old gossip about a guy possibly sleeping with a student at Oxford.

I DO NOT EVEN KNOW.

This is for my class on Oscar Wilde and the Fin de Siécle (no, the man in question above is not Wilde). Right now, we're focusing on the Aesthetic movement in the Victorian era as a background for studying Wilde and his work. And it's kind of completely fucking crazy. In a very simplistic and uninformative nutshell, Aestheticism/Decadence was a movement in the literary/art world to focus on the beauty of art without considering or including any moral aspects of the work.

From a less formal and, in some ways, more accurate angle, it was a bunch of guys acting like jackasses and calling it an artistic lifestyle. Or so I have gathered from some of the reading, man, some of these guys were pricks.

It's possible I'm feeling more judgey because, in my Irish Literature and Culture class, we happen to be studying roughly the same time period in Ireland. (This all spans, oh, the second two-thirds of the 1800s, with Aestheticism really getting underway in the late 1800s.) This includes the potato famine and the concerted efforts of England to suppress and destroy Irish culture. And I'm supposed to give a shit about a bunch of guys who considered anything of practical or moral value to be ugly? Fuck off. Yeats was, I am gathering from the combination of these two classes, both an Aesthete and a nationalistic Irishman wanting to reclaim Irish culture. This resulted in essays where I simultaneously agree with his ideas and want to smack him for being so damn high-handed about it.

Oh, and on Wednesday, in my WWI and WWII class, we covered the era before WWI starting in 1870, so there's MORE overlap. There was a bunch of crazy shit going on in Russia, Austria-Hungary, Prussia, and like everywhere else.

And let's not forget the brief discussion of Karl Marx in Sociology, which we will apparently be having more of next week.

With the added context of my other three classes, I am finding Aestheticism even more tiresome than I suspect I would find it anyway, and look forward to moving on and reading more fiction and fewer damn essays.

Don't you love when a product placement, regardless of how intrusive it is, just makes no sense whatsoever in the context of the story?

Because I don't know about you guys, but I'm pretty sure the Dollhouse doesn't use Dell computers.

. . . wow, okay. So. You know what's a really good way to highlight Chuck's inherently juvenile and creepy treatment of women? Watching an episode of it right after tonight's episode of Dollhouse.

(Yeah, I've resumed watching the second season of Chuck after exasperation with the Buy More subplots chased me off when I was marathoning the show a couple months ago. Those subplots still suck. I'm tired of all those people and I have no idea why none of them have quit or gotten fired. But the actual interesting part of the show has proven worth sitting through the annoying and boring parts.)

Buuut anyway. See, Dollhouse has its issues too, many of which are FOX-induced, but it knows it. These past couple of episodes have deliberately ramped up the creepiness factor, with Joss making the entire premise as queasy as possible without actually causing people to vomit. It's made the show better, because it's thought-provoking and it won't let you settle down and choose a side, because EVERYONE is horrifying.

Chuck just - does it accidentally. And I gloss over that, probably because of internalized blah blah blah, but going into it with the mindset Dollhouse put me in ended up with me getting pretty pissed off.

I'm not really sure what my point is here. Don't watch fun goofy stuff with women issues after watching dark creepy fucked-up stuff with women issues, I guess.

I think it's time for me to sleep now.

I assume everyone on my flist knows by now that Amazon is made of douchebags, so I'll just get to the point:

Amazon Rank.

Why.

And here is a bunch of contact information for Amazon.