I'll turn my little finger into the dying one

I got up at ten o'clock this morning. With the exception of a couple of five-minute breaks, one of which I used to prepare the last of the tortellini for lunch, the other one of which I'm pretty went toward my livejournal, I spent the hours between noon and eleven o'clock at night writing a fifteen-page paper. It has forty-seven footnotes. I'm peculiarly proud of this, although I'm almost positive that it really means I need to lay off the parenthetical discussions. I had Cheerios for dinner. I'm not so proud of that. At eleven o'clock, once the paper had been e-mailed off for professorial perusal and my brain had disintegrated into slush, I walked over to HGS with my newly-arrived copy of The Cuckoo and introduced several friends to it. Not only was the film well-received, it was so well received that when we were walking back and ran into another pair of friends who'd gone out to see the Yale Rep's production of Webster's The Duchess of Malfi* instead, two people who were not me spontaneously volunteered to see the film again with them. We also had a terrific discussion of Finno-Ugric linguistics afterward, chriscrick having thoughtfully looked up the relationship between Finnish and Saami as soon as I told him about the film. I'm not surprised that Hungarian has eighteen cases, but I do think this gave Greg Nagy a terrific advantage over the rest of us.

The rec room in the basement had previously been occupied by what we could only surmise had been a pirate-themed party: there was a DVD of Pirates of the Caribbean next to the TV, five different kinds of rum (including Nepalese, which none of us had known existed) and a carton of pineapple juice on the broken-off table next to the couch, a printed-out notice in extraordinarily bad seventeenth-century pastiche English taped up on the door, and a glow-in-the-dark, blow-up palm tree plugged into the wall. With inflatable coconuts and a monkey. I kid you not. We stared at it in some wonder before unplugging it, whereupon it deflated over sideways and stopped glowing. I'm still amazed by the rum: bottled in a thick glass knife-shape and labeled "Nepal's Finest Since 1959." Sugarcane? In Nepal? What do they make it out of, yaks? I have my suspicions.

nineweaving has tagged me for the Five Odd Habits Meme, but I think it will have to wait until the later morning: I'm so brainworn right now, I couldn't tell odd from normal behavior if you paid me. Currently I'm coming home and taking my shirt off as soon as the door's locked, but that's because it's unseasonably warm for January and the ever-loving heat in my apartment is cranked up as though it were midwinter above the Arctic Circle. Were the climate in my building a little less ridiculous, I suspect I'd stay clothed like most other people. I keep paper towels and toilet paper stocked on top of the refrigerator, but it's not as though I have a bathroom closet or much horizontal space that isn't occupied by books. I do keep a tin of decaffeinated chai in my bedroom closet, on the same shelf where I store all of my received postcards and letters in chronological strata, but there's a reason for that—it was originally intended as a gift, as I thought it was caffeinated and therefore undrinkable as far as I was concerned, and then I found out it wasn't. I have a similar stack of writing-related letters here on my desk, primarily acceptances, contracts, and the envelopes in which contributor's copies have arrived, topped with the only good image from a Boris Vallejo calendar about five years old: a butterfly-winged woman on the back of a dragon whose scales melt into translucent fins and draperies like exotic fish or an anemone. This was originally for handy reference, but now I suppose it's totemic. By the time I finally had to get a new mechanical pencil in the fall, I'd had my old one since eighth grade and Pentel had stopped making them about three years ago; I went through three or four try-outs before I found an industrial sort of draftsman's pencil that suits me almost as well, although I'm having trouble finding replacement erasers at the moment. See? None of this is very odd. I'll have another go at it in about ten hours.

Who knows how to take screen captures on an iBook running OS X 10.3.5? It's time to learn how to make icons.

*Kindly corrected by antikate: The Yale School of Drama is doing The Duchess of Malfi. The Yale Repertory Theatre is doing The People Next Door. I should not try to do anything that involves intelligent thought after days like the above-described.

Erzähle, Muse, vom Erzähler, dem an den Weltrand verschlagenen

Today, after I finally hauled myself out of bed and finished blinking at my e-mail—fortunately, the professor wants only one serious revision in the entire paper; unfortunately, it's material I put in a footnote specifically so that I would not have to deal with it in the actual text—I checked my mail and was very pleased to discover my contributor's copies of Change, the latest annual not-Not One of Us one-off. It contains two pieces of mine, the flash "Sea-Changes" (dedicated to erzebet, whose "Fisher's Bride" should illustrate the text) and poem "Bloodlines" (which almost certainly isn't the only vampiric Pesach poem in the history of the world, but I keep hoping), as well as a selection of other strange and changing pieces. I particularly recommend time_shark's acid-trip epic "Tithonus, on the Shore of Ocean," Kiel Stuart's Prisoner-esque "Memory Isle," and Patricia Russo's soft-spoken and unsettling "She Takes Up Distractions." As soon as it's available from Project Pulp, I'll post a link.

In other news—

lesser_celery tree-wrestles.

kraada free-associates.

elisem songwrites.

And schreibergasse has one of the more amusing footnotes I've seen lately, and I've seen a lot of footnotes lately.

And now I should go check on my laundry. In order to arrive in Brattleboro before noon tomorrow ("I started on a journey about a year ago . . ."), I'm looking at a six o'clock alarm and an eight o'clock bus. I'm not a morning person. I'm not a morning person. If I want to look at a sunrise, I'll stay up for it, thank you very much. But since tomorrow night I'll need my brain for storytelling and my voice for singing, tonight I must sleep. And on Monday, I return from the granite north and deliver this paper to a class full of students who actually expect intelligence from me. I figure if I can do that, I'll never have a problem with a conference in my life . . .