Hello Zara!

Tonight you are requested to attend: 2 social functions!

1) Ben's birthday drunkenness at ********* bar at 20:00!
2) Celebration of BUSA victory at ********** at 21:00!

Promptness is not required at either function.
Please also see Ian sometime tonight.

Notices:
Linear Algebra assignment due Tuesday 12:00
- Percentage complete: 0%

Computer Science practical due Wednesday 11:00
- Percentage complete: 0%

Update - Refresh - Exit

Book Meme

On the subject of Memes... picking the best of this crop would make a really good book. I spent hours reading it last night and only got halfway through. It got kinda repetitive after awhile but there were some gems (like the girl who ran over her first boyfriend with a tricycle because he was chasing another girl around the playground)

Ok. So.

List of the top 110 banned books (banned in one country or another at some time or another). Bold the ones you've read. Italicize the ones you've read part of. Underline the ones you specifically want to read (at least some of). Read more. Convince others to read some.


#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Qur'an
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe .
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair .
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Émile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Émile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes



Some of these books I was prescribed in elementary, e.g. Bridge to terabithia and Julie of the Wolves (which started out my fascination with wolves). And Little House on the Prairie? Meh? *does not understand*

I just realised how many books I don't finish as well. :D

poems

Exercises in Boyfriend
David Perez

Boyfriends contained in metal canisters fall;
attached to parachutes, they sway and sink to the earth.

Like Powdered milk, hard pasta, dry oatmeal.
It's easy to have options airdropped.
You hydrate them for consumption but only rationing will save your life.
In the field, indulgent dinners are not allowed.

They touch down on demure little laps.
If not they crash and roll.
Engulfed in flames,
one roars passed you,
metal screeching,
airframe twisting,
parachute billowing like a burning kite.
It skids to a halt.

You should examine the rubble
if only for humanitarian concerns.

When you consider the possibilities:
God is stalking you,
adventure is calling you,
lust wants pieces of you
to itself,
love is indifferent to company,
hate commandeers your neighbors,
fate mobilizes you from the inside,
you must see that resisting chance and change will shred you to ribbons.

Girlfriend. Labyrinth. I keep to the right wall.
Boyfriend. Teeter-totter. You put rocks in your pockets.
Girlfriend. Garden. I plant my perennials.
Boyfriend. Health spa. You boil in the mud.

Girlfriends fall to the earth;
as if a goose down pillow exploded high in the sky.
Perfume thickens the air.
It's like breathing in hot glass.
It does something similar to your insides.

Boyfriend sets itinerary, calls you nickname, orders meal in foreign language,
shares your milkshake, kills a spider, buys you flowers
that die in the car.
Girlfriend groans when I groan, wears my flannel, leaves fragrance on pillow, burns
popcorn, uses Tao Te Ching as drawing pad
to doodle a laugh.

We could be strangers forever.
How many things have you learned and forgotten?
How many times have you sat in a hammock,
and watched the day progress fine without you;
the sun come up over the hills, an owl fly home late
dangling a snake, the steam lift from dog shit,
and the grass stand by the mandate of heaven and know,
and remember, you've done nothing that compares.
How many times will you look at something you've created and think,
That's why I'm here.
That was the point.

Considering how many times Boyfriend will harness the atom
and girlfriend will bend the universe to her whim with
legs crossed, drink ordered, and cigarette lit- pinching it between her cuticles;
is it ever too late to take leave, jettison, exit, acquiesce, eject, depart
and partake in a nice, indulgent dinner?




Together We May Speak of the Shortness of All Things
teeth of the hydra

In the valley that cradled you as a child I have kicked
The downy heads off late summer dandelions:
By then, you were two thousand miles away. Still
I loved you. The manner moved me:
Of so many seeds sailing far, beyond the reach of mountaintops,
Dancing an unseen waltz over the face of a curved earth,
Perhaps to you. For I am nothing now, if not faithful.

Again you were with me, in your absence at the roadside.
When I climbed into that great dragon of a truck and in its belly
Hulked across immeasurable spans of western desert, my faith
Belonged to you. As it did among redwoods and Great Plains alike,
The broad, murky stretch of the Mississippi river.
Each time in your memory I laughed unaccompanied;
Each time, until the ache of it faded behind me.

You think of me at times with a stinging bitterness,
That tears neither wet nor unshed can console.
Yet I sobbed at the sands that flank both oceans
And through all the cities in between. Not simply
For things lost, but for the passing of every blue-hued day to come:
Each unwise in its constancy and unending in its rhythm,
Undefeated by solitude and unmoved by joy.


(Untitled)
July 7, 2000

In this emptiness
This absence of...
all things
This bare vacuum I cannot comprehend.
I can not understand anymore
I don't know how
I don't know how to...
Live anymore
The bare basics are forgotten to me
My eyes are closed against the sun
The brightness of the orb is
too bright for me
And I am lost and fumbling
And I cannot understand
I do not want to understand
As I reach out to grasp your hand
And I falter
I do not want this
I do not want this
I do not want..
this.

meh.

Snow

It's snowing like crazy at the moment, and it's already about 4 inches. It's amazing. Walking back from my grading (purple belt!) last night I passed Eamon's place and got some noodles and pictures of Ian's puppy (doogle) which is the cutest puppy in the world! Eamon walked me back home through lots of detours through snow and snow-eating (fresh snow is the best stuff in the world) and snow angels and rolling down hills - it was good fun and I got home around 1! I'm very tired today though so I'm just about to go for my nap before karate... again.

Valentines/Busa

"Happy no-one-bothered-to-give-this-day-a-spiffy-name-but-who-needs-a-holiday-to-give-a-pretty-girl-flowers day" <----------- That's what I'm talking about!

I've come under fire from all sides for not wanting to partake in traditional Valentines day celebrations. I never minded it as a single girl, I thought "aww, nice" and went on my own way. but now as someone in a relationship I've decided that Valentines day is crap. If you want to do something special with your special someone, why not do it any other day of the year? Why wait for Valentines day when every other couple will be doing something and you're just one in a million? Why should you feel pressured into doing something special just because society tells you you have to? Why must this day exclude all the single people? I've been asked why I love Christmas and don't particularly like Valentines. That's why.

My Valentines night was nice, I came home from uni to Eamon, went for a nap, woke up to find Will in the house as well, and a little bit later Ian came by with strawberries! We hung around, went to get some chinese takeaway and came back and hung around for a while. It was nice.

BUSA took place this weekend - it was very tiring and I lost my first fight so that sucked. :( I contemplated giving up on fighting altogether considering that I have been training on average 4 days a week for the past 4 weeks and I still couldn't get through my first round, but I'm not going to. I'm going for the SUSF. Many many years ago I came last out of about 40 other girls in a 50m Butterfly event. I'm a slow starter, but I just have to put in more fights. More swims, more fights, and possibly some contact lenses! Saying that, there were some very good fighters in my category who have probably put in if not as much, more hours than me in training and well done to them for making it through.

Unfocussing on me, I was very very proud of our team, Zoe won a gold in her category and Lisa picked up a silver in her category in front of her father and 13 year old brother who were immensely proud of her. I enjoyed the company of the Shukokai and look forward to seeing them at the SUSF where we can exchange friendly blows. :D Edinburgh went on to win overall at the BUSA for the third time in the row and the fourth time in five years. Beautiful. I think we also would have won the loudest cheering squad, though closely followed by Bath who put in a good showing. The men's Middlesex kumite team were amazing and very very scary!

I felt quite down after my initial loss but have been assured by many that the judging was unfair although my technique could have been improved. After my grading on Tuesday/Wednesday I'm going to take some time out to give my many injuries a rest and catch up with my work and see Ian and my friends more often before starting back on training for SUSF. And then it's going to be win win win all the way. ;)

It's the night before a CS hand in and the labs are all a bustle...

It's also the night before Valentines day and guess what Ian gets in his inbox....?

Roses are #ff0000
Violets are #0000ff
All my base are belong to you.

(from don't know where)

Results

The results are in! I got a stunning 64 on both Computer Science and Foundations of Calculus. Several Variable Calculus still has a "-" beside it though, it's highly likely that just means a "0"! Word is that many people failed SVC and there is a figuring out of what to do with it!

giddy

Tomorrow, when I wake up, he'll be in London, on the same island as me, in the same country, on the same continent. It's like magic!

Rar. I hate being injured. Do I take time off to heal and not practice or do I practice and not heal and potentially (probably) make things worse? I wish I could have a magic healing potion (+10! Restored to full health!) but all the drugs on the internet couldn't fix me right now.

Damn you internet, not good for everything are you.

I start at 10 tomorrow and finish at 1 and have the whole afternoon off.... will attempt math and computer assignments.

Mmmm

The unofficial Zara Christmas/Birthday list (give you 10 months to save money to splurge on me!)

1. An Ecosphere
2. Ally Mc Beal box set!!! just not the last two series, please. Bonus points if you get me the ones with Josh
3. Worm farm. Can be found at Natural Earth.

More to be added later!