So now that I'm finished with my semester, I can get started on the real work. My program offers us a certain amount of money towards "professional development," which we can take for almost anything--conferences, production costs (for the playwrights and screenwriters), or summer writing projects. I've taken some summer money so I can get a jump on the novel. Here we go.

Thing is, the money is very generous, but I'm in the unfortunate position of having $17K in student loans that come out of deferral the instant my semester ends. As in, now. So the money I got from the Michener Center is going to be quite thin, and I'm in the process of tightening my belt. Anyway, the point is, I have a small list of the same 5 cheap meals I've been eating on and off during various harsh times for the past decade (baked potato, egg stir fry, eggs and toast, peanut butter and jelly sandwich, spaghetti and sauce), and I'm looking for new suggestions. What's your favorite easy-to-make, money saving meal? Post it here and earn my gratitude.

I'm not a vegetarian, but I like to eat vegetarian as often as I can. And the meal suggestion doesn't have to be totally dirt cheap--I'll splurge on things like fresh veggies a couple times a week. Thoughts?

Motherfucking finished.
Screw your rules, I'll use as many syllables as a damn well want to.
Because I am too tired to count.
And also because I am fucking rad.

Four pages to go.
Ass chafed from brick-like words.
Anyone have lube?

Please don't judge harshly;
Poop metaphor's all I have
Left in broken brain.

Life imitates art.
Writing on hysteria;
Now: panic attack.

Each word emergeth,
Like a too-large brick, through my
Dainty aperture.

I just accidentally ran out of Veronica Mars. I thought I had a whole disc to go but it turns out the last disc is all "special features." You know what special feature I would have really liked? ANOTHER FOUR EPISODES OF VERONICA MARS. Now what am I supposed to do? Write my paper?

The worst part about falling in love with canceled shows is, well, they're canceled. No matter how hard you hope, there will never be another episode of Firefly, or of Freaks and Geeks, or of Veronica Mars. If I ever become a multi-millionaire (I know we're all holding our breath on that one) I'm going to start a network for niche shows that are astoundingly good but that don't pull in bottom-line ratings. Then the rest of the world can enjoy O.N.A.N. Idol or Incest Dancers or whatever the hell they want to watch and those of us with IQs higher than the average can of Chef Boyardee Spaghetti with Meatballs can enjoy some quality programming.

I'm reading Freud again for the first time since my undergraduate career--Studies in Hysteria. I'm always interested in cutting back to Freud's own work, as opposed to some of the more strained interpretive leaps his followers have made. Freud tends to get a lot of flack from critics because he was wrong about so many things, and, more often, because his work has long out-lived its shelf-life in terms of therapeutic usefulness (Oedipal nonsense and penis envy being rather less useful in the long term than an early modernist gentleman might have anticipated). That said, Herr Doktor was really pretty revolutionary in some regards. While some of his systems and equations don't quite hold up, his is the first modern construction of trauma. He has an understanding of pain as an event that must be processed actively, or else it will come out through the body in some grotesque manner. That doesn't seem so far wrong to me.

Okay, yes, hysteria as a disease is a patriarchal artifact, a pathologizing of women's bodies. Freud as a man immersed in his own time was not interested in deconstructing that myth; he was interested in finding ways to treat patients. And megalomaniac he might have been, but how many people--how many women--did he empower to own their own pain? He notoriously hijacked the personal narratives of many of his patients. But did he also allow them access to language they didn't know they were allowed to use? Did he also allow them to see themselves as human beings with internal worlds as vital and as real as their male counterparts?

Tonight we saw Big Man Japan at the Alamo Drafthouse and I highly recommend it. It's a mockumentary about a sixth-generation tokusatu-style hero (think Ultraman in a fallen age). Sato is pitiful, broke, and his ratings are down, but he's still up for the daily grind: in his case, a jolt of electricity that makes him grow to thirty feet tall in order to fight the giant monsters that occasionally attack Japan. It's funny, but in that bleak Brazil type of satire rather than the more flippant Spinal Tap kind of satire. An amazingly smart movie, and also amazingly sad; as much about the strained internal battle Japan wages with itself over the worst of its consumer culture, and especially the disruptions facing the nuclear family, as it is about bizarro monsters.

It's a really Japanese movie--there were in-jokes lost on me and as gaijin go I'm relatively Japan-savvy--but if you're at all a Japanophile (or love kaiju or Super Sentai genre stuff), you really should see this. It's pretty amazing.

It's a listing-related book meme, and we all know how I feel  about listing. And books. There are several on here I am coming out of the lit-hipster closet about. No, I've never read Catch 22. I have been planning to for a long time. Also it seems I fear and avoid Russian lit. Maybe I should remedy that.
These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded.

Bold the ones you've read,
underline the ones you read for school,
italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.
add * beside the ones you liked and would (or did) read again or recommend. Even if you read them for school in the first place.
Edit: on helpimarock's suggestions, books I'm most anxious to read but am quite interested in reading are in red.

The Aeneid*
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay*
American Gods [I've heard it's good...but I love Gaiman the graphic novelist, not so much Gaiman the prose stylist, so I never got to it]
Anansi Boys
Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir
Angels & Demons
Anna Karenina
Atlas Shrugged
Beloved*
The Blind Assassin
Brave New World
The Brothers Karamazov
The Canterbury Tales
The Catcher in the Rye
Catch-22
A Clockwork Orange
Cloud Atlas*
Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
A Confederacy of Dunces
The Confusion
The Corrections*
The Count of Monte Cristo
Crime and Punishment
Cryptonomicon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
David Copperfield
Don Quixote
Dracula
Dubliners*
Dune
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Emma*
Foucault’s Pendulum
The Fountainhead
Frankenstein*
Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
The God of Small Things*
The Grapes of Wrath
Gravity’s Rainbow
Great Expectations*
Gulliver’s Travels
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius* [I know, I know, people love him or hate him. I actually liked this book. Sue me.]
The Historian: a novel
The Hobbit*
The Hunchback of Notre Dame*
The Iliad*
In Cold Blood: a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences [Okay, yes, I know. I'm not sure how I haven't read this one yet. It's on the damn list.]
The Inferno*
Jane Eyre*
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell*
The Kite Runner
Les Misérables*
Life of Pi: a novel [I absolutely despised this book.]
Lolita************ [Absolutely one of my favorites. Because it's brilliant, not because it's dirty. Maybe also a little because it's dirty.]
Love in the Time of Cholera
Madame Bovary
Mansfield Park
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlemarch
Middlesex [It's on the list. I am pretty sure I'll love it when I get there.]
Mrs. Dalloway********************  [Transcendent. And I wouldn't use that word lightly.]
The Mists of Avalon
Moby Dick* [Okay, honestly, I'd probably skip the cetology stuff the second time through]
The Name of the Rose
Neverwhere [This book is one of several reasons I in fact did not read American Gods.]
1984
Northanger Abbey*
The Odyssey*
Oliver Twist*
The Once and Future King
One Hundred Years of Solitude*
On the Road
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest*
Oryx and Crake
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present
Persuasion
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Poisonwood Bible
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man*
Pride and Prejudice*
The Prince*
Quicksilver
Reading Lolita in Tehran
The Satanic Verses
The Scarlet Letter*
Sense and Sensibility*
A Short History of Nearly Everything
The Silmarillion
Slaughterhouse-five [It's on my nightstand. Soon.]
The Sound and the Fury******************** [Faulkner's finest, and one of the most important books in my life]
A Tale of Two Cities
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
The Time Traveler’s Wife
To the Lighthouse
Treasure Island
The Three Musketeers
Ulysses*
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Vanity Fair
War and Peace
Watership Down*
White Teeth*
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
Wuthering Heights*
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

So for like the twentieth time since starting this Romantic literature class, I've had to bite my lip to keep from blurting something out about Wallace in class (it just seems like a dick move to be chronically bringing up something apart from our communal syllabus). If you had asked me a few years back what Infinite Jest had to do with Romantic literature I might not have had an expansive answer, but the answer is "actually quite a lot." The cult of genius, the rise of metafictionality, and a very specific flavor of the whole "individual v. community" question...I feel like there's an awful lot of intertextuality.

This is what schizophrenics see when they turn on the televison.

Today I am grateful for my discovery that Jason Dohring is in fact twenty-five. It makes my crush on him a lot less sketchy than I'd originally feared.

Back in January, I issued a challenge to all of you: decide on one habit that, for two or three months, you'd focus on making more environmentally viable. The crux of the challenge was the idea that a lifestyle overhaul is intimidating and self-defeating, but bit by bit we might be able to make our lives more sustainable.

My challenge was to stop using disposable plastic bags at the grocery store. I'd estimate I've been about 80% successful, which, considering how scatterbrained I am, I think is pretty good. I've also almost entirely stopped using disposable kleenex (except when sick), instead using cut-up tee shirts as re-usable hankies.

In the coming months, I think I'm going to focus on cutting back the amount of packaging I buy in my grocery shopping. I'm not sure how to measure my success here. I'm OCD  enough without keeping empty containers lying around to weigh or whatever. Maybe I can just do a weekly count and tally? I also turned the temperature down on my water tank, but that might not last. I really do love a scalding shower. Still, maybe as the weather around here gets warmer I can handle a merely-warm shower.

How have you guys done on your challenges? And what are you willing to try next?

Yesterday you got the doggerson, but I know what you all are really hanging around here for.

Well, three weeks on and the dog is still in my yard. No one came forward to claim him. I've started giving more credence to the idea that he was a street person's dog. He seems really uncomfortable inside the house, and a lot of normal dog activity has been lost on him. He knows absolutely no commands. I'm not sure if he's housebroken or not--he hasn't been inside long enough for me to find out (I haven't had him disease tested yet and don't want to expose my cats, but I did put him in the bathroom one day when it stormed outside). The good news is he's actually a pretty fast learner. He's not the dummy I thought he was. We've almost got "sit" down, and he has grasped the concept of fetch pretty well.

Right now my plan is to take him to the vet and then try to re-home him. I love the little guy but I don't think I have what it takes to be a doggy mommy (esp. since the respective doggy daddy is entirely unwilling, the deadbeat). I have one or two leads on people who might be interested, so we'll see if any of those options pan out.

In the last picture I posted he was exhausted and pathetic. Here are some pictures of a rested, well-fed and socialized doggerson:

Mimsy Buttons has another of our incredibly fruitful chat sessions up on Polterheist. If you want to learn all about the glories of NASCAR romance novels skeedaddle on over. And comment on her blog, if you feel inclined. She's lonely over there.

So as per usual we were talking about porn, the topic at hand being the website Slasher's been hired to work on. The website involves a lot of specialized fantasy-sex multimedia--literal fantasy sex, as in magical sex. drawgirl was elucidating the manifold possibilities to spacecowboytom in the backseat of the car in a perfect monotone: "You can have vampire on werewolf, vampire on fairy, vampire on elf, vampire on dark elf, vampire on succubus..werewolf on fairy, werewolf on elf, werewolf on dark elf, werewolf on..."  The three of us busily came up with various other magic-sex opportunities (centaurs, mermaids, time travelers, Ziggy Stardust, etc).

me: What about superheroes? What about like magical superheroes? Like Dr. Weird. Isn't he a magician superhero? Could you have superhero on werewolf?
drawgirl: Er...do you mean Dr. Strange?
me: Whatever. Sure, Dr. Strange.
drawgirl: (pause) Well sure, but only if he was a magic magician.
me: Oh, a magic magician? Really? Was he magic? Did the magician have some kind of magic powers that made him magical? Thanks for specifying.
drawgirl: You know, as opposed to someone who was bitten by a radioactive magician.

Suddenly, in the middle of Powells, weighted down by the books in my basket, everything re-aligned itself and I was left to marvel at how much stress can make you forget yourself. Most the reading I'd been doing in the previous months, since the upheaval and uprooting and reschooling, had served the absolutely linked functions of survival and distraction. The fiction had impacted thinly, the reading a function of habit more than devotion. Which was not to say the reading had been poor, or wasted; but I was suddenly recalled to the bottomless passions the best fiction opened to me when I was awake enough to let it.

Yes I know this is overwrought. I'm reading Ann Radcliffe right now. Cut me some slack.

Many glasses of wine later, drawgirl and I had resolved all the details of my wedding. Not only will it be a theme wedding, but it will be a pirate theme wedding. And not only that but it will begin with the boys on one sailboat and the girls on the other sailboat and the girls boarding the boy sailboat (maybe while swinging on rigging lines!?!?!?) and grabbing the boys and taking them back to the girl sailboat and then the wedding happens! I plan to wear a blue naval jacket and a hat with a feather. AND there will be rum.

No this is not a wedding announcement, by the way. This is just the wine.