Really, nothing is more cathartic than This American Life. Put me on drugs, send me to therapy, but nothing will get me more in touch with my emotions. That sounds dumb, but it's usually a struggle for me. I'm one of those people who can just block stuff out and not feel. But when I listen to this show, I feel...I don't know, I just feel. Sometimes that is amazing in itself.

I forgot about it. I haven't listened to it in a month or two. It figures that in that time I've been feeling pretty shitty. No one in their right mind would say I've been doing so badly because I haven't been listening to a particular NPR show, but I swear it's true. Maybe that means I'm not in my right mind after all. Very possible.

If you've never heard the show before, you should listen to it. All their episodes are available on their website, streaming for free, download as an MP3 for a fee, unless you subscribe to their podcast. It's just...it's really beautiful. It's hard for me to find beauty in things, but somehow this show always gives me something.

Every now and then I want to laugh out loud at something like The 40-Year Old Virgin, or sob uncontrollably at Life is Beautiful. But typically, I can't connect to that. TAL is magical in the way it presents the everyday. The absolute minutia of your life become fantastic, and so so so meaningful. Yeah, the stories are funny, or sad, or introspective, or something, but they're just so real that you can't help but be a little moved by the whole thing.

If you want to hear some of my favorite episodes, here are a few:
What I Learned From Television
Seemed Like A Good Idea at the Time
Reunited (And It Feels So Good)

That last one is really a classic. It's the one everyone talks about when they talk about TAL, and for good reason. It's great. I have more favorites, but I'll leave it there. If you start listening and want some of my top picks, I'll be happy to share.

Labels: radio

I have burned my espresso. I am drinking it anyway, but really I am crying, and mourning the loss of tastiness.

Also...

No, that's all.

Labels: daily grind

Hello Internet,
I think I will instead try making not blogging drunk my new tradition. That sounds like a much better idea.

I woke up early this morning and walked all the way to the freaking SCC to go to a 9am doctor's appointment. When I got there they said they had contacted me several days ago and canceled. Apparently they actually canceled with some nataliegens@uchicago.edu instead of me, nataliegenz@uchicago.edu. So fuck you nataliegens, whoever you are. You should have told me my appointment was canceled.

But then I went to the bookstore and got happy books. And by happy books I mean: Steven Colbert's I Am America! (And so can you!), One Hundred Years of Solitude (did you know that won a Nobel prize? I missed that somehow...), and a collection of Grimm's Fairy Tales.

I have a strange fondness for fairy tales. I already own The Complete Works of Hans Christian Andersen, and The Complete Fairy Tales in Verse and Prose by Charles Perrault in French and English. That guy is fucked up. Do you know the real story of Sleeping Beauty? I will just tell you, there are no happy fairies that follow her around. There is just a mean old bitch who was pissed that she didn't get solid gold silverware are Aurora's christening, so she cast the spell and Aurora died when she turned 18 or whatever. But then the prince came along and raped her dead-ass. Then, while dead, she gives birth and the baby can't find her boob and instead sucks her finger and the splinter of wood comes out and she wakes up. And that is only the beginning of the fucked-up-ed-ness. Then we get to the fact that the prince's mom is an ogre and tries to eat them all. It's okay though, because in the end the prince comes home early and throws him mom in a fire.

Isn't that nice?

He also wrote "Little Red Riding Hood" and "Bluebeard" and some other stuff. LRRH is pretty straightforward (hint: they're all dead at the end), but Bluebeard is weird. It's just a guy who marries girls and then kills them when they look in the closet where all his past dead wives are. It's strange.

One of my favorite fairy tales is (also French) "The Bluebird." Talk about fucked up. I can't even begin to describe it, but you can read it yourself, and you should. That site actually has a lot of awesome ones.

"The Little Mermaid," by Hans Christian Anderson, for instance - seriously fucked up. The witch cuts out her tongue and then every step she takes with her new legs cuts likes knives. And even though she was the one who saved the prince from the shipwreck, he falls in love with the girl who found him on the shore where the mermaid left him. The spell says the mermaid will die at daybreak when the prince marries another woman, so her sisters trade their hair to the witch for a magical knife that the mermaid can use to kill the prince before sunrise and turn back into a mermaid when his blood touches her feet. But she refuses, and instead of dying (because she's pure of heart or something, I'm not really sure) the becomes a "daughter of the air" and has to float in and out of the houses of men to see little children in the night for three hundred years before she can get to heaven, and every time she sheds a tear because a child is being naughty, another day is added.

Now I have to do some laundry.

Labels: books

I've never been much of a drunk dialer, so instead, let me start a new Natalie-tradition: drunk blogging.

Tonight's post: Holy shit I am so fucking wasted. Sorry if I fucked anything up at your apartment Robyn.

I will post pictures tomorrow.

Oh shit I have to teach intermediate tomorrow. I'm fucked.

Why didn't Jon come? There were lots of disappointed ballerinas.

Labels: amusing, ballet, daily grind

Are you in high school? Do you want to go a college that isn't UF? Do I know you? Yes? Then I am probably cool with you coming to visit you and giving you a good show of the school and letting you crash at my apartment instead of participating in organized activities with a dorm. I give awesome tours. Mostly, that means I won't make you stand in the middle of the C-Bench and say "I wish I were a University of Chicago student" like the tour guides here make you do.

Anyway...Max? Margaret? Nick? I'm looking at you.

Labels: friends, school

Today has been a generally depressing day.

Woke up late, which means all day I've felt like I completely wasted my morning, and that I'm just generally a worthless mess.

Taught intermediate class, badly. Barre went well, but then someone said something that made me feel like an inadequate teacher, and I just couldn't let it go. I was a wreck all through center. Not the first time, either. I'm pretty sure Ilana would ask me to not teach anymore if there was anyone willing to replace me.

Then of course I realize that I'm such a wreck because I can't let go of some stupid little thing, which makes me hate myself even more.

Then Glacé rehearsal, which was not that bad, but just sort of reminded me that I'm kind of a dick, and that I'm not nearly as good at putting this piece together as I had hoped.

Finished The Brothers Karamazov (finally). Really fucking depressing ending. Even Alyosha's little funeral speech. Was that supposed to be uplifting? And what about Ivan? He's the only character I cared about. Why doesn't that get resolved? Also, he's too good for Katya.

Then of course the nightly ritual of "crap, I can't do my homework because I have no idea what is going on and I'm not smart enough for this school."

And the really depressing part of my day, because after all, I'm a nerd, and so this really made me upset: reading the first twenty or so pages of The Communist Manifesto. I like Adam Smith, but that's not such a horrible offense. But you know, I get a lot of crap for liking Ayn Rand. I get a lot of people telling me I'm a naïve, idealistic, slightly insane, and (why not?) chauvinistic horrible capitalist. I usually take it in stride and laugh it off. But you know what? I do like Ayn Rand. Whatever that makes me, it's true. I think there is so much beauty in her ideas. Whether or not it is realistic or moral or whatever, I don't care. I really think it's beautiful, and I don't think I should be criticized for having many of my beliefs line up with hers.
So yeah, I just got so angry reading Marx. I know that's the idea; I'm bourgeoisie and all, so he's trying to take me down and I'm not exactly supposed to be thrilled. Still, what he says really makes me sick. But then again, it reminds me that I'm just an idealistic, immature little girl who reads bigs books and thinks she knows better.

And that is a very depressing thought.

Labels: ballet, books, daily grind, school, whiny

So yeah, I need more distractions from my essay. This is from Joe:

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of 30 September 2007). As usual, bold what you have read, italicise what you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. Add an asterisk* to those you've read more than once. Underline those on your to-read list.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22 (How have I not finished this yet?)
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged*
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984*
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver's Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye*
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an Inquiry into Values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
Bastard out of Carolina

Labels: books

I'm a little bummed about spending my weekend writing a paper on Adam Smith, so, to keep myself alive, I am composing a list of things that are generally good:

- mint chocolate chip ice cream
- coming home to a room that smells like old coffee and wine
- making jokes at the expense of fundamentalist Christians
- breaking in new pointe shoes
- listening to feel good Broadway songs
- Russian literature
- Christian Bale movies
- knowing someone cares that you're feeling sick
- guilty pleasure indie pop
- Tobias from Arrested Development
- sex
- learning to swear in another language
- my brother Gabe
- Jim and Pam
- unexpected blog comments
- dreams about sexy literary characters
- Mormons who send you posters that make all your friends think you're pregnant
- Boris, my rather stupid but incredibly entertaining fatty cat
- Kurt Vonnegut
- imagining someone in particular is thinking about you, and then realizing he actually is

Labels: happy

Proposition: Define...
cosh x = (e^x + e^-x)/(2) and sinh x = (e^x - e^-x)/(2) for all x. Given numbers a, m, n, find a solution of the equation:

f''(x) - a²f(x) = 0 for all x
f(0) = m and f'(0) = n

that is of the form:

f(x) = c1cosh ax + c2 sinh ax for all x.

Proof: What?



What would happen if I turned in my problem set as is? Four and a half problems out of eight done very shabbily. What would happen? I would not drop dead. I would not even have to face the disapproving glare of my professor, since he has no idea who I am. I don't even think my TA does. Actually, come to think of it, I have no idea who my TA is. At this point, how much to I care about this class? I need to pass it. But do I care if I just barely pass it? Why is that so hard to accept? I know damn well I'm good at econ, and I have no doubt that I can get an A for each of the intermediate econ quarters if I put a little effort into it. To graduate with an econ degree I only need a 2.0, a fucking 2.0 in my major. So, shit, why do I care about this?

Note: I do care about this. It doesn't really matter that my brain is telling me to pack up and go to bed. My brain is at the same time telling me something terrible will happen if I don't throw myself at this class 100%. Fuck you, Brain.

Labels: school

My moodjam currently says "overwhelmed." But that doesn't feel totally right. Because, really, things are good. I just wrote up a fabulous ballet class, (anyone who is coming to class tonight should be psyched), and rehearsals this week have been great. I don't have sosc tomorrow, I'm also done with my econ homework, and my French is practically doing itself. Not to mention things are great with my stalker. I think his floor is officially dirtier than mine at the moment, so no need to worry about driving him away with that. He's off soccer-ing for the weekend, which sucks, but at the same time, should let me write my sosc paper with no distractions. Wow, that sounds horrible.

The point is I should be pretty much stress free. But there is this stupid stupid thing nagging on me. I can't do my math problem set. I can't. I've tried, but I'm currently at 0%. I feel like I'm in Computer Science 151 again. It's the feeling of complete failure just because I'm not perfect at one thing. And I'm so desperate to avoid that feeling of failure that I have not looked at my problem set all day today, even though it is due tomorrow morning.

I can't drop the class. I need it for my major. I mean, I could theoretically drop it and take 195/196, but then I'd feel like my 199/203 were completely wasted. They were really satisfying, but so so so much work. Also, it's too late to get into 195 for this quarter. And I can't go to grad school if I do that. So whatever. Fuck. I miraculously ended up with a B- in comp sci, so maybe I'll pull that off again.

If I can hold on till December I can look forward to never taking a math class again. I refuse to count stat and metrics as math classes. They are to mathy. That makes sense in my head. I go to the University of Chicago. We don't do math in math classes.

FUCK. HOW DO I DO THIS SHIT?

Labels: school

When I was a kid my mom would not let me go to ballet if I stayed home from school. At first, this was devastating. In elementary school, I only had ballet once or twice a week, and I'd be damned if I had to miss it. In high school, when ballet was misery, it evolved into staying home from school not because I wanted to skip school, but because I couldn't deal with going to ballet.

I'm feeling really really shitty today. Yesterday, too, but today much worse. Some sort of sinus thing. I will go to the Student Care Center tomorrow if I don't feel better, but over the counter meds have been working well enough, and the SCC is kind of a joke anyway.

But yeah, despite my feeling like shit and not going to any classes today, I plan on going to ballet. I'm thinking I'll do as much as I can in class, probably just barre, or even less, and then sit around doing math homework until my rehearsal.

Honestly, physically exerting myself doesn't sound that bad. The idea of the mental strain of my math homework is the real pain in the ass. I still feel terribly guilty though.

I really doubt my mom has any idea of the things she put in my head when I was young that now have such a strict hold on my every move.

Labels: ballet, school

Where the fuck are my songs? Where are they? I want them back!

I do not use iTunes every day, so I cannot tell you exactly when, but I can tell you that sometime between Wednesday evening and this morning, anything and everything I've added to my itunes in the past year has been deleted. And not just from iTunes. It is gone gone gone. And it's not in my trash either. All my movies, tv shows, music, podcasts, and playlists are gone. All of them. What do I do?

For the record, system restore did not work. I'm really just holding off a huge mental meltdown here. I do not take things like this lightly.

Also, it says I have about 365 gigs of music, but only 800 songs. That makes a lot of sense. Especially since I have a 40g hard drive and an 80g external, both of which are practically full already.

Talk about lack of control over things in my life...

Labels: music

Okay, so, I make myself pretty vocal about how I want the music industry to get a grip and start embracing technology. So you can guess how excited I am about Radiohead's new album, In Rainbows. It comes out October 10th, available for pre-order now online. Why so awesome? It's a name-your-own-price world. On 10/10, you can buy the album (for download only) for any price you choose, including nothing. Then, you can also pre-order the diskbox, which includes a vinyl and a bonus CD, along with the regular CD and Radiohead's consistently awesome album art. The diskbox is about $80, well out of my price range, but still tempting. It's also only available (and only will be available) directly from their site.

For some reason I named a price above $0. I won't say how much, but it was more than nothing, and that's what matters. Because really, I have no idea why I did that. I just wrote a page for sosc about self-love in the labor market, and now I'm thinking, Why didn't I maximize my profits here and get it for free? I'm not sure. Honestly. I'm not being haughty or anything, I just felt like I wanted to pay something. Probably because I love this idea so much I want them to do it again, and I know they won't if they just give away a billion downloads.

All right, I'll own up. I payed $5 (converted into pounds, of course). That's really all I care to spend on new music, and if it's offered to me for that, I'll pay it, but not more. Also, I will probably buy the diskbox when I am not poor. Well, maybe

I own up because I'm curious. If you go to the site and pre-order, can you comment and let me know how much (or how much of nothing) you chose to pay? Just pure curiosity.

Labels: music

I can't remember the last time I was awake this early. It probably had something to do with high school. I mean, I've stayed up this late before, but to actually wake up? I don't know.

---

ballet = good
boy = very good
school = good enough

So why have I been such a downer the past few days? That's no way to attract a stalker.

Labels: daily grind