So I like this picture and I'm too lazy to scan another. So you got a problem with that? If you're not nice I'll put up the manatee pictures.
Before I start today's vague rambling, I want to state that this will not be one of those web journals which are filled with intimate details of my pathetic life, poor little me. It's a cold, cold world, the internet is; or at least it would be if I were running it. Gone from all server space would be bits and bytes making up those websites wherein the creators share their every sniffle and tear over the dysfunctional mess of their existences. Nothing can make me hit the back button faster than a self-obsessed member of Generation Z's non-rhyming poem about their razor cuts, genital tattoos, and how mommy and daddy ruined his/her life by making them go to church every Easter. And as for those people who try to indicate facial expressions in their emails thusly: "I so agree with that! (smiles) Like Depeche Mode (smiles) sings about my life!" Maybe drug use does ruin the mind.
The preceding mini-rant is brought to you courtesy of the web author who promised that there would be a rant up on the site and as usual has not gotten around to writing one, though her brain seethes with ideas.
Speaking of ugly tasks, today my research paper proposal was due, and of course I hadn't actually sat down and written one. (I'd so much rather work on this website which brings me neither money nor good grades.) I finally drove all the way to hell-and-gone where the local university is and visited their library, getting my courtesy card. I was overwhelmed; where had this place been all my life? It's huge, several (well, four or five) stories, zillions of computers and books and things. To think I'd thought the public library was IT. That's where you go to get Danielle Steele's latest. You go to university libraries to get Real Books, books with lots of big words, books written in nearly unreadable Academese (in a few more generations it will be a distinct language from English -- the scholarly world never got over the loss of Latin as the dead language that separated them from the masses). I was going to insert a sample but realized that I had managed to check out the most readable of the works on my subject (Hamlet). I had a touchstone: if the text mentioned "Foucault" then it went back on the shelf.
Why Hamlet? Well, I went to conference with my teacher to fish around for a topic I could focus on and of course went blank when he asked me who my favorite writers were. ("Writers? I don't read! I never read!") He was probably wondering where I kept my brain. (In my pen? Is that how I aced the essay quizzes?) I guess I was afraid of the blank stare ("Who's Jack Vance?"), or worse, the condescending sneer I used to get in childhood whenever adults saw the lurid covers of the scifi or fantasy novels I was reading. This from people who read dreadful occult horror fiction (imagine cheeseball versions of The Omen) or spy novels. But I digress. I doubt mentioning "Tolkien" et al would have had the effect I so feared. I just can't talk to people, and I was fighting off a virus that just finished up with me over the weekend, and anyway I was tired and needed coffee. So I managed to choke out "Shakespeare" and so I'm stuck with Hamlet (fortunately the character, not the whole play -- yay, I get to ignore Ophelia, that wimp). At least it's my favorite play in the whole wide world. But then later that week I caught a biography of J.R.R. Tolkien on one of the cable channels and thought "gosh, wish I'd picked him." But there has already been too much written about the Allegorical Subtext of Frodo as Christ-Figure, so we'll let me practice on Hamlet.