Things the assembled audience may or may not know about me

I have a midterm on Thursday. I hate this month. I've discovered that putting some cinnamon in with hot chocolate mix is divine. I own Christmas cards (that will not likely get sent). I've started going to church again and even to a youth group, and (to my knowledge) Hell has not yet frozen over. I awoke with a bang to dead silence in the middle of the night, and didn't realize until much later that what woke me was the poster above my bed falling off the wall. I'm going to vote in a federal by-election today. I really, really despise mornings. I can sort of cook these days. I miss my family. I (and my lab partner) fully ROCK at dissection. I'm going to a book club meeting tonight. I'm buying a Christmas present for a 10-year-old girl through a Children's Aid Society partnership, and I'm not sure what I should get her. I like doing presentations. I like fanfiction of both the racy and the non-racy varieties. I disapprove of mushrooms. I'm almost at the end of my current journal and I don't have a viable blank one to start when I'm done (and this makes me uneasy). I have two books left in the Series of Unfortunate Events. I'm going to see Beauty and the Beast tomorrow night. I bought Mary Oliver's A Poetry Handbook the other day, and feel kind of self-conscious about this. Sometimes I can smell the anatomy lab, even when I'm not there. I can sing along with songs I haven't heard in seven years. I have, still, very serious doubts about the prudence of me becoming any kind of physician. I liked Stranger Than Fiction. I want to put Christmas lights on my roommate's hibiscus tree. I have lavender-scented body lotion that makes me happy. I wish I didn't have to learn every freaking contour and bump and ridge and depression of every freaking bone of every freaking limb.

I'm off to Starbuck's to study.

I'll talk to you all in the relatively near future.

~isolde

P.S. Given my last entry, I thought this week's poem-of-the-week that I got in my e-mail was apt. It's posted under the "words" section.

Mid-November Blahs

We're halfway through November. I don't know where October went yet. This is a bit alarming.

Somehow I missed the earliest stirrings of the Christmas retail season, with the result that when I went to the mall this weekend it hit me full in the face like a glittery, red-and-green sledgehammer. Usually I'm ready for it. Usually, I moan and groan in a socially-appropriate way at how early malls start playing Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and hanging ornaments, but deep down I can't suppress a thrill of excitement. This time, though, I really am troubled. I don't feel up for it; I feel like there's a lot more settling in and getting used to things that I have to do before I can start dreamily humming carols and shopping for stocking stuffers. Seeing Christmas in the stores just makes me feel behind, harried and inadequate. I think this means that I'm getting old, since this is how early Christmas signs make my mother feel, and I could never understand that before.

November. What is good about you, November? Aside from the occasional birthday, you're 30 dreary, cold, dark days filled with stress and tears. Something should be invented to perk November up, here in Canada where Thanksgiving shares a calendar page with Halloween. Kyasuriin plunged in and is doing NaNoWriMo, and I wish her well...despite my insane jealousy at her creativity and sheer nerve. I guess that would perk November up, if I ever worked up the guts to participate. But still. A nice ease-ourselves-into-Christmas holiday would be nice.

Ah well. I'm not going to invent one at the moment. May as well get on with the minutae of the week.

~isolde

Cultural Learnings of America

It was going to happen sooner or later -- I was going to fall back into my old pattern of rarely blogging. I'm going to try to dig myself back out, but no promises. What can I say? I think it's just the way I am. Sometimes I want to plunge in, participate, and contribute. Other times I just want to sit back and dangle my feet in the river as it rushes by me. And of course, at other times, I don't want to be anywhere close to the riverbank at all. It's the same for everything, school included. I WISH I always wanted to be swimming, but it's just not that way.

But -- I'll tell you a funny story to start in the blog-renewal process.

My parents, being good citizens of both the British realm and the 1950's, wanted to go see the movie The Queen over the weekend. On the way, they wondered aloud if the theatre would be full (since it was last time they tried to go see it), and I muttered "No, I doubt it. Borat's out now." To which my father replies, with a supreme lack of concern for my delicate sensibilities: "Oh yes. I wanted to see that."

*pin drop*

When I had regained the power of speech, I asked him to clarify. Turns out Borat made an appearance on Jay Leno the other night, with Martha Stewart. My mother chimes in to say that it was the funniest thing she had ever seen in her life. In her words: "She tried to teach him how to make a bed -- you know, hospital corners and all that -- and he had a TOTALLY DIFFERENT IDEA of what that meant! Oh, it was so funny!"

Needless to say, the thought of my parents, who are turning 70 and 68 this year, sitting through a theatrical presentation of "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan" sent me running for the nearest paper bag. But my horror wasn't over: my mother then proceeded to drop into a BORAT IMPRESSION. My mother. Who serves tea in china cups and believed that the novel Trainspotting was about the charmingly innocent pastime of railway photography.

Sometimes, I'm just not sure what to do with them....

~isolde