bironic

L'shana tova, anyone who's celebrating the new year.

Thought this would be a good time to finish up one of the remaining Israel trip posts. Continued from here.


( Day 13: Masada, Dead Sea, Jerusalem. )

( Day 14: Jerusalem. )


And after that, we had our last Sharing Session (omg), filled out evaluation forms that left little room for constructive criticism, changed into going-out-in-the-evening clothes, had dinner together at a cafeteria/restaurant back near Ben Yehuda Street, and were herded to a small bar/dance club, where we were instructed to remain until about 12:30 a.m., at which time we were driven back to the hostel, packed our stuff, and went to the airport to check in for the flight home at 3:00 in the morning.

Except for the few who were staying in the country—like me, itching to hang out with roga and spend some time sleeping, God exploring some more of what I wanted to see, at my own pace.

Coming up in the next and final post…

Last call for holiday cards...

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I will be in Boston this weekend, Saturday through Tuesday if all goes as planned, and so (a) will be fairly incommunicado and (b) am wondering if any Cantabridgians/Bostonians/Brookliners/whoevers want to maybe meet up one of those days for hot chocolate or something? I don't know exactly where I'll be when, other than that Monday afternoon/evening is the grad information session and interview behind the whole trip, but if anyone's interested, maybe we can work something out.

* * *

The Project of Doom at work is going fairly well, considering that the deadline is in two days. Aside from all the extra time I've been putting in, it's actually been kind of enjoyable getting to work on only one project for two weeks straight instead of a dozen projects daily. In that short time, I've noticed an improvement in my mood and ability to concentrate. There's a definite team spirit in the air, too, among the five of us who're working on this thing. The revisions are going to be annoying, though, and will probably stretch out into the new year. Still—what I need to get done by Friday should be done by Friday, and that means I'm in the running for the promised promotion (at long last!).

In other news, it's definitely December. On the 1st, the temperature dropped into the 20s with a stinging wind; it snowed about an inch on Sunday (and then rained, which washed it all away); and today it was cold and windy again and started to flurry in mid-afternoon, so that by the time I drove home, ghostly whorls of powdery snow were blowing across the road in the wakes of cars, visible patterns of turbulence. The dusted trees and bushes on our street are glowing, eerie and beautiful, under the lamplight.

I am a quarter of a century old today. It feels at once like quite a lot and hardly anything at all. Twenty-five years, and still straddling the border between adolescence and adulthood.

...That's about all I've got; for once, I'm not feeling particularly maudlin or even introspective. Perhaps it has to do with just having returned from a relaxing and fun week with synn, jumping straight back into work today, not having too much time in which to brood, and/or becoming naturally less, rather than more, morbid with age.

To celebrate, there will be fic later. It's not new, exactly -- I'm still working on the two stories due in August -- but rather that long story I mentioned on the 1st, soon to be unlocked. Nothing says happy birthday like an inbox full of comments, right?

Also! Very happy birthdays to those of you who are celebrating/have celebrated around now: synn, purrlia, firestorm717, alisel_kat (much belated), elynross -- am I missing someone?

Last year, I invited all of you to tell the stories of your usernames. You are still invited to chip in over there. This year, I will merely be a geek and list some celebrities who share(d) my birthday: George Bernard Shaw, Aldous Huxley, Carl Jung, Stanley Kubrick, André Maurois, Mick Jagger, Nana Visitor (Kira on ST:DS9), Helen Mirren, Kevin Spacey, Sandra Bullock and Kate Beckinsale. How strange the ways in which we feel connected to people.

Hope you had a happy Thanksgiving, those of you who celebrated it (and weren't at my house). For the rest of you, hope you had a nice week and I'll be checking in with you soon.

My much-needed mini-vacation went very well. Family and practically-family came over for turkey on Thursday, with leftovers devoured Friday in the traditional day-after feast for friends. My sister came home from school (again) and was actually in the house much of the time. We played with a Graveyard Duel Lego set care of synn -- put Harry in the cauldron and made Lucius, Draco, Voldemort and Snape dance in a circle around him. (Snape couldn't blow his cover in front of them, you know, and a not insignificant part of him would be tempted to let the kid burn.)

Met up with a school buddy and two of his friends in NYC on Saturday. We went to the Frick Museum -- not thrilled, to be honest; that is, he had an impressive collection for one man, but most of it wasn't my taste. There's something about that 17th-c. portrait and still-life style that unsettles me: how everyone looks white-and-pink-fleshy, half sticky and half as though they've just stepped out of a milk bath, and the way the pearls and grapes look hard, blurry, translucent, with the streak of white for shine. I haven't yet been able to pinpoint or precisely describe what it is I don't like about it. Anyway, I was fond of a small bronze figure of Mercury holding Argus' head, a painting of a long-haired girl kneeling in front of her tutor and holding her hand to a candle so her fingers were translucent, and a couple of other paintings. We walked through in under an hour.

Wandered down Madison Ave. and discovered glorious window displays: one of a grotesque royal family (think Nixon in Phil Collins' music video for "Land of Confusion," if you've seen that) with Charles in garters in a bathtub, Blair wearing an HRH crown, and a photo of William glaring at the back of Camilla's head; and one in all grays, Tim Burton-style, of Marie Antoinette with a papier-mache head, dusty wig and huge gauzy skirt under which were lighted mannequin heads and cake box covers. Popped in to F.A.O. Schwartz (where we found a life-sized plush giraffe on sale for $10,000) at the request of one of his friends, who is a fellow American Ballet Theatre fan and therefore was allowed to lead me wherever she pleased, at least until she suggested watching the "laser show" on the ceiling of Grand Central Station which turned out to be a mercifully brief horrorshow of flickering, semi-animated constellations with a halfhearted ski jump, mistletoe and script "Season's Greetings from the MTA." Dinner at a Peruvian restaurant in the East Village (my, don't we sound cultured) and a highly unnecessary dessert at Veniero's bakery up the street, which will for ever & always sound like "venereal disease" and so be too disturbing to fully enjoy its products.

Other than that there was much of the television watching, if by television we can mean episodes on DVD or videotape, namely House, Firefly, Buffy and Star Trek. Also The Queen of the Damned on a whim of synn's. Pretty much the only fandom left untouched was Harry Potter -- despite twice being invited to see the movie again -- although I did read a fic by Jaida ("The End of That") when she announced that she'd archived her work and chosen a few favorites, and am printing two of Sam's 250-page magnum opuses (magni opi?) tomorrow for future enjoyment.

The nice thing about all this is that because no day was spent immersed in any particular fandom or form (e.g. no triple-feature Buffies or six hours reading articles), and because social activities broke up the reading and watching, it didn't result in that awful feeling of having wasted the weekend. Rather, it was relaxing and enjoyable and felt like revisiting old friends -- House and Wilson at Christmas, Simon watching River join the dance at the town fair, Q taunting Picard and Vash, Vincent Perez living it up as Fey!Marius, Willow and Giles fighting while newly-chipped Spike sits tied to a chair. Plus there was the traditional Peanuts Thanksgiving special.

It was also an excellent weekend for reading. Worked on the journal bibliography and made it through another stack of fandom and fan fiction articles (Salmon & Symons' "Slash Fiction and Human Mating Psychology" is one of my new favorites), and Henry Jenkins' infamous Textual Poachers finally arrived in the mail. Having suddenly remembered the concept of reading for pleasure, I re-read A Separate Peace on the train to and from NYC on Saturday (still good -- more on this soon), and today am most of the way through The Phantom of the Opera.

Have been sorry to discover that Raoul is as whiny in the book as he was in the show, with an extra helping of immature volatility. Within a page, his musings will go like this: He loves his blue-eyed angel, his soul-mate, his perfect, tragically victimized, innocent Christine -- no, he hates the double-crossing, coy she-devil, stringing him along while conducting secret rendezvous with what must be her lover -- he must rescue her immediately from the fiend -- no, he should let her go with him as punishment for her duplicity.... I think the author, Leroux, may be having fun with him, or else time and culture have changed reader interpretation since 1910 and Raoul now makes for one petulant, ridiculous, mostly unsympathetic hero. The Phantom is also more vampiric than even the musical insinuated -- he sleeps in a coffin, looks like a skeleton, smells of death, is cold to the touch, is only glimpsed at night, lacks definite corporeality -- and in the tradition of Dracula, less fleshed out. The abduction was described after the fact in an extended monologue, also in the vein (ha ha) of Dracula and the Vampire Chronicles. We'll see about the final confrontation.