she's back

back again!

in the meantime, i have:

• not watched as many episodes of battlestar galactica as i'd hoped (only on 4.5 -- and to think i'd been afraid of finishing before the end of the school year!), but it helped like you would not believe with my thesis
• watched a hard day's night & subsequently acquired every single beatles song + enough knowledge to sometimes have coherent discussions abt their music + the strangest complex re: john lennon being literally despicable & john lennon being a fascinating, v talented dude
• committed to the university of ------------ !
• earned myself a trip to france this summer (three weeks in champagne, i think?)
• baked the following chocolate chip/chunk cookie recipes, with varying levels of success -- still in search of the perfect one: salted chocolate chunk cookies (smitten kitchen), crispy chewy chocolate chip cookies (smitten kitchen), brown sugar chocolate chip cookies (butter baking). all good! all recommended!
• read THE GOLDFINCH which changed my life; also HUIS CLOS which changed my life as well but not really in the way sartre probably intended
• not been home enough to do much else besides learn how to play twist & shout really, really clumsily on my guitar i've had for six years & only just truly started to play

notes on a febrile february

having spent the first week of this month with the flu & the latter weeks with an overwhelming sense of...being overwhelmed, I'm glad it's over. it brought with it a few good things, though?

first, TALK TO ME ABOUT: battlestar galactica, first & foremost. & always. much of the latter half of the third season was a drag. "maelstrom" included. (blasphemy? never!) I had a feeling that that wouldn't be the last we'd see of Kara Thrace. but! CROSSROADS. "all along the watchtower," the version I'd heard even before I heard the real thing, was everything I expected, just as lovely as I expected -- but the courtroom with Lee & Romo Lampkin & Baltar, Adama judging, Roslin on the other side was absolutely something. it's not in the least cheesy, as I'd feared it would be. not even when Lee has his Big Ol Monologue about Justice and Guilt and Accountability and all the most important things in the world, no, it's wonderful. it's wonderful & you will feel so righteous & so proud of what Lee's grown up to be. the Adama Drama of the entire season comes to an end; Lee's doing what he ought to have been doing all along. that is, showing the rest of the fleet how to do the right thing instead of being holed up as CAG.

RAZOR: didn't expect anything, was (as usual) completely surprised. there are few things I wish the show would do better: one of them is expand on the commander-xo relationship between Lee Adama & Kendra Shaw. also: Kendra + Kara, the friendship we deserve, the friendship we barely got to see before we said goodbye!

THE FIRST reading block of the year presented itself. usually, I enjoy jo nesbø's writing. COCKROACHES, however, was a drag. like, more of a drag than the all the tyrol-centric episodes of bsg combined. gillian flynn, on the other hand, has been a godsend. gobbled up SHARP OBJECTS, gobbled up GONE GIRL almost as fast (if only I hadn't totally spoiled it for myself). DUNE & its sequel DUNE MESSIAH proved far better than I thought they were upon my first reading of them at age 12; I still think the plot's pretty capital-B Basic, but what Herbert has to say about religion is killer. more later.

pictured: blackberry oat muffins (highly, highly modified from the linked recipe, which'll lead you to smitten kitchen's blue sky bran muffins. among other things: I didn't have any bran), mom's strawberry beignets,

a) i still exist (existence precedes essence, cogito ergo sum, what? r&g left me confused on several levels.)
b) i have been reading a lot! i have so much to say about so many books! mostly those by gillian flynn! but others as well! which leads me to the fact that i:
c) have changed my thesis topic, more later. (a thesis of little consequence, as i've said before, but a thesis i'm no less into because of it. think BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, but not in the same sense.)
d) also, i should memorize this in the next month.

winter scenes

from the top: the best snickerdoodles, blondies (or simply blondie batter, if you want to stop at that point -- I nearly did) | lavash bread (will leave the pizza to your imagination; ours were heavily inspired by all the lavash & otherwise pizza we ate in Pasadena!)

thesis thoughts (ii)

• reading Dean Young's AGE OF DISCOVERY & considering how humans can't use science to explore the Big Things: like, in this poem, LOVE.
• reading everything Dean Young's ever written.

thesis thoughts (i)

AT PRESENT: still as-yet unable to articulate what exactly (as opposed to exactly what) it is that I'm writing about, despite having read (everything) I can find on the subject. the mysterious subject. the subject about which I can say nothing definite besides that it is The Subject. but I can give you a general idea?

• there is A Reason out there -- perhaps not my raison d'être, but it's close. it's the reason I so love BATTLESTAR GALACTICA: humanity, yes (and how -- my brother often walks in while I'm watching it & complains that it's not as "futuristically focused" as its name would have it. "DIRTY HANDS" did this more than most; give me another show that has an entire subplot devoted to collective bargaining rights. in space. mais I digress.) humanity, but also good science + scientists, engineers, doctors. plus a healthy dose of UNKNOWN in the form of the cylon god. it's this UNKNOWN in which I'm interested, but only in its sci-fi setting.
• which brings me to INTERSTELLAR -- I'm interested in that particular thing in that particular setting because sci-fi ought to be able to explain everything. it tends to overexplain, in the case of William Gibson. but when confronted with this UNKNOWN, it can't. the characters -- civilizations, whatever -- are at a loss. the book/film/show ends with this unknown still unknown. this is where INTERSTELLAR & 2001 diverge. (this is also where I ought to stop using italics to make my point.) the former loves explanation too much! the latter leaves all things up in the air. there are those -- physics majors usually -- who appreciated INTERSTELLAR's explanation of its own climax. I thought I would; I didn't. I am not religious, but I'd have preferred the fifth-dimensional humans to be gods; they are, I suppose (in their incredible difference from us), god-level, but they are never explicitly referred to as gods. perhaps that's the point. perhaps I'm missing it completely. anyway, an excess of quantum physics does not always a compelling story make.
• that said, these are the books I've read: MISS SMILLA'S FEELING FOR SNOW (not at all science fiction, but mystery, which tends to have the same problem; also, chock-full, at least in the beginning, of lovely Euclidean metaphors) & EINSTEIN'S DREAMS (the whimsical end of speculative fiction, ridiculous notions of time interspersed with the publication of the theory of relativity itself) & SOLARIS (the most fitting: direct mention of the UNKNOWN being a godlike figure, but a fallible god, a childlike god -- read it!)
• so: mankind! womankind! humankind! versus the unknown. books that refuse to explain themselves. this is getting more concrete by the...week.

lastly: fully aware that this is a thesis of little consequence, as theses go -- but damn it if I haven't been asking everyone what they plan to write about, even if I don't know myself what I plan to write about, beyond ~vagueness~.

the choice says a lot about a person, I think, as do most choices involving books. currently reading: Mann's BUDDENBROOKS, introduced to me by my interviewer for [redacted; nobody needs to know where I'm applying! because nobody else tells me the truth about where they're applying! & I'm not high-minded enough to rise above the struggle, it seems.] it's her favorite novel. an inversion of P&P, so far, and German to boot.

A DAY IN AUSTIN & ELSEWHERE: several Caldwell kolaches (including: poppyseed, delicious but might maybe make you opium-positive), a lot of Kerbey Lane + a lot of SoCo, three $50 dresses (as in: affordable & frankly a steal, but more than I am comfortable spending -- but also p gorgeous), PRINCIPLES OF AMERICAN NUCLEAR CHEMISTRY, cacti growing out of dinosaurs, too-decadent bread puddings, a hard-fought & well-deserved Lady Aggie victory over Vanderbilt, and two instances of celery-craving later, I am home.

it was a very good one (as I race to bed, eager to keep up my EIGHT-HOURS-OF-SLEEP-STREAK before waking up at 7:30 to film tomorrow morning. peace.)