random things

[rynne]

A week and a half left until my first AP test this year. Damn them.

I donated blood for the first time today. And I've got this weirdly-shaped bruise on the inside of my right elbow where they thought they found a vein, only they didn't, so then they had to use my left.

Naps on Friday afternoons are becoming usual things for me, apparently. Still tired, though. Six more weeks of 7am class, then I'm done.

Somehow, I am going to prom this year. In a dress. I'm not quite sure how to feel about this. o.O

People need to bug me to write that Good Omens fic that won't stop bouncing around in my head. I'm such a lazy ass.

Did this post have a point? No, I don't think so.

ETA: Why not? Most recently gacked from krabapple.


1. The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Had to read this last year in English, and hated it. He took fifty pages to do psychoanalytical shit that he could have written in five paragraphs, and everything was so obvious, and geez. I just hated this book.

2. Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens. I'm not a Dickens fan; what can I say? I don't like his writing style, I couldn't manage any feelings for his characters except that they're either stupid or stereotypical, and there's too many goddamn coincidences.

3. Hamlet, by Shakespeare. I feel a bit guilty saying this so close to his birthday, but...yeah. Couldn't manage to like Hamlet, though I like Shakespeare in general. I thought Hamlet was a whiny ass with an Oedipus complex, and the only character I liked was Horatio. (Well, I like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but only in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead)

4. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce. I've not finished it yet--we're reading it right now--but, English Teacher, please stop going on about how great Joyce's sentences are. If he were still alive, he could learn a lot from thistlerose. And stream of consciousness is overrated.

5. Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte. Heathcliff was a DICKWAD, Catherine was selfish as hell, and their "love" seemed to me to be so intense as to be inhuman. I don't understand why this is called one of the greatest romantic novels of all time.

...How ironic that four of those five books are ones I've read just this semester.

Comments

[cenori.livejournal.com]

I feel weird now, because every time someone on my flist does this, they ALL hate books that I love. (Except for Wuthering Heights. Ickies.) Soooo... now I'm starting to wonder if there's something wrong with me. :( My book collection feels sad. *pets it*

;) Just goofin' with ya, but seriously, does this make ME the weird one???? Or, at least weirder?

[rynne.livejournal.com]

Let's go with "we're both weird". *g* I just tend to not like books that have too many neat coincidences (like Dickens), or do a lot of psychoanalyzing.

Though, hmm. If I'd remembered about it, I think I would have substituted Heart of Darkness for Hamlet. Do you like that one?

[cenori.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've always thought Dickens's novels were too comparable to soap operas. Particularly Great Expectations (though, I do get a kick out of that book just for the humor.) I mean, EVERYONE'S related to EVERYONE ELSE. It's Six Degrees of Estella, I swear.

You know, I've never even heard of Heart of Darkness. Hmm...

As far as books I don't like, I hated both Black Like Me and Death Be Not Proud. And Death of a Salesman. Any opinions on those?

[rynne.livejournal.com]

Awww, I loved Black Like Me. I haven't read Death Be Not Proud, and I didn't much like Death of a Salesman...

If you haven't had to read Heart of Darkness yet...don't. Hated that book.

[thieving-gypsy.livejournal.com]

Aww, Wuthering Heights is top of my favourites list! It is definitely the OTP of Dickwad/Selfish, though. They're not nice characters, I sort of like that.

I hate Dickens. HATE HATE HATE HATE. Good stories, I generally like when they're filmed, but his writing can fuck off and die and rot. HATE. >.<

This is a good meme. :D *steals*

[rynne.livejournal.com]

I don't think I would have minded them not being nice characters...if their love didn't seem too intense to be real. I didn't like either Heathcliff or Catherine, but I think it would have been better if I could sympathize with them and their love. *shrugs*

[kabeyk.livejournal.com]

Yes, yes, yes! I hate Wuthering Heights with a passion! All the characters are horrible! Horrible! How is bashing your head against a tree romantic? What about digging up your lover's grave? Argh!

kx

[rynne.livejournal.com]

It's not romantic, it's creepy. Heathcliff was so the type to have been a stalker.

[thistlerose.livejournal.com]

*blushes liek whoa*

I tried #4, too. I even tried to like him because he's Irish. But...gah. I couldn't get into it, and the middle was like a quagmire from which I had to run away.

I hear "Dubliners" is good, though. I mean better than "Portrait". :)

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

"Dubliners" is pretty good. Portrait is just Stephen Dedalus being whiny and self-conscious about his talent until you want to bitchslap him. Oh, and the Catholic guilt. I never figured out where all the Catholic guilt came from, and I'm Catholic. Well, lapsed, but with all the Catholic schooling and training.

Great Expectations. I read all of Dickens on my own. Most of Dickens was good. Great Expectations was the worst except for Barnaby Rudge, which was bad because it dealt with Catholicism and Dickens clearly didn't know beans about Catholicism.

Great Expectations was bad because it was dull. There was the usual orphan kid--children in Dickens have a terrible tendency to have no mother, no father or no parents--who was being raised by a saintly blacksmith and his emotionally abusive wife, the orphan kid's sister. Pip grows up and gets a fortune from an unnamed source.

Right away, I lost interest. Pip just got handed everything. And for no particular reason. Most of the rest of the book is just about him wasting his time being a rich young man-about-town. There's no plot for about three-quarters of the book.

And Estella? Waste of time. She treated Pip like dirt from childhood up. I kept expecting him to react like a normal kid and insult her back, or punch her in her snotty mouth, but of course Pip never did that.

The only interesting character in the entire book was Miss Havisham. Naturally, she's the one who is on stage the least amount.

I liked Hamlet. I hated Romeo and Juliet. Well, I liked the poetry. It's the lead characters I hated. I mean, look. Romeo, who's in love with some girl we never see named Rosaline, crashes a party. Meets Juliet. They instantly fall in love. (Poor Rosaline.) Huge balcony scene. Next day, they get married. They spend one night together. There's a duel. Romeo gets exiled, and Juliet is supposed to marry Paris. She's terrified she's going to be forced into marrying him, which to me makes NO sense. I mean, is it so impossible to sneak out of town and meet Romeo? But no, she and a monk who evidently has been dabbling in English mysteries in his spare time arrange to have Julie fake her own suicide. (Yeah, like the suicide of a very young and well-to-do Catholic girl wouldn't be covered up in Italy.) Romeo doesn't get the news that this suicide is fake, and he kills himself. Over a girl he's known three days. Then she commits suicide.

Hell of a way to start a marriage.

I thought they were both idiots. Especially Juliet. Who the hell wants to get married to a guy she just met--and at the age of thirteen? As for Romeo, I figured that since he could fall instantly out of love with Rosaline, he'd fall out of love with Juliet in about a month, and then some other Contessina or Lucia or Simonetta would catch his eye and he'd be in love with HER for a while.

I love most of Shakespeare. But R & J? Ick.

The Scarlet Letter. I didn't mind Hester, and Pearl was okay (if, like her name, slightly unstrung--and I'm stealing that line from Richard Armour). But Dimmesdale and Chillingworth were both assholes. If I'd been Hester, no WAY I'd have kept quiet to spare Artie's sterling rep as a preacher. Nope. Your kid, your responsibility, and if you're not going to say you're my daughter's father, then I'll tell the whole town for you. Get it?

I really was disappointed in Hester when she didn't do that. At fourteen, I was much more assertive than I am now.

Wuthering Heights. Now I can't read it. I loved it when I was twelve, though. And I could relate to Catherine a lot better than I could most nineteenth-century fictional heroines. Both she and Heathcliff were selfish jerks, but that was a breath of fresh air after all the pallid heroes and heroines in so many other books.

[ignipes.livejournal.com]

I hated Romeo and Juliet. Well, I liked the poetry. It's the lead characters I hated.

Ah! I thought I was the only one! Romeo & Juliet are about the stupidest fictional characters ever created. And to make it even worse, there are so many people in the world who honestly use that ridiculous play to set their standard of ultimate romance. It's NOT a romance. There is nothing remotely romantic in the entire play. It's a tragedy of stupidity.

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

Oh, it SO is. The whole tragedy could have been avoided if R & J had bothered to use their brains for something besides sitting on for half a second.

I love Ogden Nash on the subject:

The Romantic Age

This one is entering her teens,
Ripe for sentimental scenes,
Has picked a gangling unripe male,
Sees herself in a bridal veil,
Presses lips and tosses head,
Declares she's not too young to wed,
Informs you pertly you forget
Romeo and Juliet.
Do not argue, do not shout;
Remind her how that one turned out.

[lareinenoire.livejournal.com]

Well...I probably shouldn't wander in her on the side of R&J, but I have to say, there are gorgeous speeches (the one from Act III about Juliet's wedding night is one of my favourites of all time), and forget not for all ye slash fans...Mercutio.

::grins::

We all know he was in love with Romeo the whole time.

[thistlerose.livejournal.com]

I think the fact that Romeo and Juliet are so young and stupid is partly the point. They're wild and passionate - and look at how they ended up. O_o I love the language of the play - some of the speeches are truly exquisite - but the plot is pretty lame.

Don't feel badly for Rosaline, though. Romeo is moping at the beginning because she rejected him. Juliet was afraid of being forced to marry Paris because 1) she believed herself in love with Romeo and 2) bigamy is illegal. She couldn't have run after him because her family would have gone looking for her, and dragged her home in disgrace - or sent her to a nunnery - after killing Romeo.

Not trying to change your mind about the story. Just saying...

[ignipes.livejournal.com]

Oh, I agree that being young and stupid is the point. I'm sure that's what Shakespeare was writing. However, that's not what many people read. Far too many people read it as a genuine tragic love story, as if being in love and dead together really is some romantic ideal to aim for. So I guess my main annoyance with the play is how people interpret it, not entirely with the play itself. There are sillier plots and characters in the world, after all. :)

[thistlerose.livejournal.com]

Yeah...I can see how that would be annoying. Like I said, I read R&J for the language. For tragic love in Shakespeare Othello, and even the crazy mindfucking that goes on in Antony and Cleopatra.

[rynne.livejournal.com]

I've read a bit of Dubliners--at the beginning of the year, my teacher read us the last paragraph of one of the stories, which is supposedly "the best paragraph in the English language", and Dubliners is far better than Portrait of the Artist. Urgh. (I have to have it finished by tomorrow. Dammit.)

[violet_quill]

The last time I gave blood I had a bruise on my arm so bad that one of my professors asked me if "everything was alright at home". Um.

Oh, and write GO fic. Youknow you want to. :)

[rynne.livejournal.com]

I keep getting all these bruises from my swordfighting class. About a month ago, I had this gigantic one on my leg, that was really colorful, and it rather freaked people out when I showed it to them. :p

Hee. Well, I do want to. It's just getting around to it that's the problem.

[ignipes.livejournal.com]

Somehow, I am going to prom this year. In a dress. I'm not quite sure how to feel about this.

It's better than going without the dress. ;)

GO write bouncy GO fic! GO GO GO! <-- I would make a wonderful cheerleader. Except for the lack of cheering and leadership skills.

[rynne.livejournal.com]

Ahaha. If I hadn't known that it would disappoint my mom horribly (and if I hadn't had a not-so-subconscious desire to look pretty :p), I would probably have rented a tux. *g*

[marauderthesn.livejournal.com]

I liked The Scarlet Letter, but God, did I detest, loathe, and abhor Wuthering Heights.

The first time I gave blood, my evil friend was next to me ominously chanting, "Blood of the enemy, forcibly taken..."

She is a perfect example of how one can love and hate someone at the same time. :)

[rynne.livejournal.com]

Gah. Couldn't stand Scarlet Letter--first book I've read in an English class that I actually hated. Unfortunately, have read many more (like Wuthering Heights) since then. *sigh*

Well, I was donating at 7:15 in the morning. Not many people around to taunt me. *g*

[regala-electra.livejournal.com]

I adore Hamlet. Because he's all about the angst and the woe and he fucks everything up so damn badly and it's awesome that almost everyone dies in the end and the language in that play is all bendy and mind-fuckery good. and I was so inspired I wrote an epic fic with the themes of Hamlet in mind

Totally agree with you on all the others, although I just don't care about Dickens. So I didn't care about Pip and of course it's contrived and of course his main character is an idiot who has everything fall into his lap, because that's Dickens. Now, I haven't even read A Tale of Two Cities all the way through, for it bores me to death, that opening. It was the blah of blah de blah I must add more words so I get paid, son!

[immortalis.livejournal.com]

I had a bruise on my hand from an IV for wisdom teeth removal for weeks afterwards. Stupid bruising from needles.

Write the GO fic. *prods*

Also, I'm afraid we can no longer speak since you h8 on Hamlet. He is, after all, my fictional boyfriend.

[rynne.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Well, now that I think about it, and remember Heart of Darkness, Hamlet doesn't belong on the list so much. Does that help? :p

[juliette-kelley.livejournal.com]

I love knowing that there is someone else in the fandom close to me in age-- my first AP test is May 2nd and I just went out today to Barnes and Noble to buy AP English and AP US History study guides (the History one is a crossword puzzle book! FUN!). Luckily I took AP European History sophomore year and passed with a 4, so I'm not as nervous as I would be otherwise. I'm sure you'll do fine. If you don't mind me asking, which subjects are you taking?

I just posted a comment on thistlerose's LJ about my secret hatred for Great Expectations. Funnily enough, The Scarlet Letter is one of the books I had to read this year for English. I got through the first few chapters before succumbing to sparknotes, lol.

Am reading Macbeth this year, which I like less than Hamlet, which I read last year. We saw the movie in class where Hamlet's Oedipus complex is really graphic-- the bedroom scene with his mother, creepily enough, seemed to 'intrigue' many guys in my class.

I've been tempted by The Shoebox Project to read Wuthering Heights, but now I'm second guessing that...

btw...

[juliette-kelley.livejournal.com]

On a random note: Donating blood seems to be a disaster for everyone in high school-- a senior at my school gave blood and the nurse walked away to get something, and the machine just kept taking blood. So the senior is sitting there and suddenly keels over in a dead faint, causing much panic as people scream and generally panic. Since I was born in Germany in the late 80s, it's illegal for me to donate blood because of mad cow disease risks. No, really, I'm serious. So I suppose I'm safe from blood-donating fiascos. :)

[rynne.livejournal.com]

I took AP Euro sophomore year and passed with a 3, but it was my teacher's first year of teaching that class, and he had no idea how to do it, and I was one of about twenty-five (out of a hundred or so) who passed.

This year I'm taking Statistics, English Literature, and Government. They're my fifth, sixth, and seventh AP tests, urgh. Hate AP tests. I've always been a quick test-taker, so finishing with an hour to spare and not being allowed to take out a book or something...torture. And last year, when I took the AP Spanish test, we were in the library instead of the gym cause there weren't many of us...and being surrounded by all those books and not allowed to grab one...Gah. >.<

I loved Macbeth, though not as much as Julius Caesar, which is what I read sophomore year. I like Shakespeare in general, but I couldn't get through half of Hamlet before succumbing to sparknotes myself. :p

Wuthering Heights...is the sort of book you either love or you hate. You have to read it yourself to find out which, though.

[juliette-kelley.livejournal.com]

I loved Julius Caesar-- read that freshman year. I was surprised that I liked it much better than Romeo and Juliet.

AP tests zap my brain-- I couldn't read a book after one of those tests; maybe a magazine, but a book, no. I hate them too, though that has much more to do with general anxiety and the actual test-taking part. I think I would die if I had to take AP Spanish-- my report card is always the same: straight A's... except for a B in Spanish. Drives me nuts.

Did you ever take AP Psychology? I'll have that exam next year, as well as Biology and English Literature (this year is English Language). I'm sure there's others I'll have to take, but for my own sanity I won't dwell on them now...

If you don't mind me asking, what college are you going to? Do you know yet? How stressful was applying for you? (In case you couldn't tell, I'm *really* nervous...)

[rynne.livejournal.com]

Read Romeo and Juliet (which I hated) and Merchant of Venice (which I loved) freshman year. Sophomore year was Julius Caesar, junior was Macbeth, and then senior was Hamlet. My mom, who used to be a senior English teacher, had her students read Othello, because she doesn't like Hamlet either. :p

I'm just a good test-taker in general (you'd never guess I'm a National Merit Scholar from my GPA. *snerk*), but as long as it was something other than sitting and staring at the bricks in the wall, or trying to sleep, I'd be happy to do it.

AP Spanish wasn't that bad, though. I'd been lazy the whole year, and I'm far better with reading/writing than speaking/listening, so I only got a 3, but I think I did so well because of my essay. Throughout the year, my teacher kept telling us we'd have an easy topic, like talk about your family or school or something. Know what it was? "Who is responsible for the citizen's welfare, the government or the individual?" So I wrote an essay on that, in Spanish, and I think it kicked ass. *g*

AP Psychology? Whoa. I might have taken it...if it was offered here. Nevada=STUPID BACKWARDS STATE, so we don't get many AP tests aside from the basics (though we've got Latin Virgil WTF?). Though I might not have taken it anyway, as I've got a godawful case of senioritis, and three AP tests is enough for me.

I'm going to University of Puget Sound, in Tacoma, Washington. I've known since mid-December, since I applied early decision. :D And it wasn't that stressful, but that's just cause I knew Puget Sound wasn't out of my reach (like Princeton or something would have been :p), and because, since I applied early decision, I only had to wait a month before I knew.

[suyari.livejournal.com]

*bugs you to write that Good Omens fic that won't stop bouncing around in your head*

[teaspoon.livejournal.com]

I had to read The Scarlet Letter this semester, and I hated it too. Also, so with you on Wuthering Heights--I wrote a six-page paper last year on how Catherine was super-selfish and their love was not romantic AT ALL.

[rynne.livejournal.com]

Scarlet Letter=EVIL.

Heh. A couple months ago I wrote a paper myself on how selfish Catherine was and how unromantic their love was too. :p Mine wasn't as long, but my teacher put a cap at five pages.