So the early-music ensemble I'm in has permission to give a concert in St. Brigid's Church in Amherst, which is apparently a Big Deal because the priest is a hardass who doesn't like blasphemous college kids fucking with his church. So we are to be on our best behavior. This priest's name?

Father Smegol.

We laughed when we found this out. We laughed for like five minutes. In fact, we laughed so hard that the director finally had to cut in with "Will you guys stop it? We're wasting precious rehearsal time!"

Oooh, I just did course registration for next semester. I'm not sure whether my courseload is going to be more insane than this semester's or less; on the one hand I won't be taking five classes anymore, on the other hand I will no longer be taking any classes that are too easy for me. In fact, two of them will be more-or-less on-level (Latin and discrete math), but the other two I am wretchedly unqualified to take. One is Foundations of Computer Science, which has discrete math as a prerequisite, and the other is an upper-300 level (!!!) French course on the year 1830. Which I want like burning and my French teacher encouraged me to try it, but it is apparently filled with senior French majors who just got back from a year abroad in Paris. Which... yeah, that's not intimidating at all. If it turns out to be murderously difficult, there's always a course on medieval and Renaissance France; since I'm already taking Old Norse and Latin, that would be half a medieval studies minor right there.

What's cool, though, is that either one of the French classes would count towards the history or social science requirements you need to graduate with Latin honors, both of which I'm missing. I hadn't expected to ever take a social science class, so yay for getting away with things.

...on the other hand I got so little sleep last night that I was falling asleep in class and writing nonsense phrases into my notes without even realizing it. (No, self, Broadway has nothing to do with hash tables or binary search trees.) Oh well, at least in the subsequent much-needed nap I missed the LJ outage.

Dear civil union apologists,

I thought we got it straightened out back in 1960 that there is no separate but equal. You think civil unions are good enough for same-sex couples? Okay, I'm down with that, as long as they're good enough for straight couples too.

Yeah, you heard me. Seems fair enough. You get exactly the same benefits as you did before, you have exactly the same legal responsibilities. You just don't get to keep the special word for yourself. That's what equal protection means. If you want to say you're married, that's not the government's place: you go down to your place of worship and make your vows before whatever god(s) you believe in, and everything is fine and dandy. Your conservative church won't be forced to marry two dudes any more than the Catholic church can be forced to marry a Jew and a Wiccan. All you'll lose is the ability to say "You're not married, you fags!" to the gay couple who got hitched at the Unitarian church down the street.

Does that sound okay to you? Great! Does that sound kinda empty and insulting to you? Well fuck, think how it sounds to all the people you're telling they can have everything but the word "marriage."

Unless that was the point, in which case fuck you with something sharp.

Sincerely,
Someone who really needs to stop reading the comments on news articles

*peeks out from under horrifying pile of homework*

This entire week has been one giant endless Monday, Y/N?

Tags: edumacation, epic fail

I have cringe-inducing fucktons of homework due in the next week, and yet somehow I ended up killing three hours on Wikisource reading A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Or parts of it. Wiki doesn't have all of it, and I would probably do better with a paper copy anyway--the tl;dr effect kicks in when it's words on a screen.

At any rate, I can't really bring myself to feel guilty, because it's much better brain food than anything I have for homework. I can't count how many times I had to stop myself from yelling "Oh my god yes EXACTLY" aloud. And it's kind of sad how relevant it still is. Yes, the legal goals of the women's rights movement have succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams, but until a philosophical change has been brought about, Mary Wollstonecraft will still be insisting from beyond the grave: women do not exist solely for men's enjoyment. We do not have a duty to be beautiful and charming and pleasing to men; we have not failed in some respect if we're not attractive; loving women because they are beautiful and captivating is not the same as respecting them; and to go one further, loving a woman just for the artful, arduous beauty demanded of her by society is akin to complimenting a slave on his shackles. "Getting a man" is not only not the most laudable possible goal in our lives, it's if anything the most paltry of accomplishments.

And for god's sake, beauty is not a prerequisite for respect. If you can kick ass and take names, who cares whether or not you can do it without smudging your lipstick?

Tags: feminism

I'm not normally one to talk about politics, but there's been something transcendent and surreal about the past week. Bittersweet. Like losing a battle and finding out that somewhere, off in the distance, a war has been won.

Obama's election signals such a huge change in America's mentality, but it doesn't change what's going on right now. Only how to look at it. Amidst all the media coverage about the campaign that transcends race, it was never reported that in a peaceful neighborhood in Northampton, Massachusetts, bordering the grounds of one of the most liberal colleges in the country, somebody burned an Obama-Biden sign like a cross on his neighbor's lawn. The electorate that put a black man in the White House also snatched away rights that had already been granted and denied children homes in the name of protecting children. How do you wrap your mind around that? I've been going back and forth between jubilating in our huge step forward and wincing at the viciousness of our little steps back.

And in the larger view, the gap between the future we're hoping for and the grimness of the present reality is staggering. I was crying watching Obama's victory speech, crying happy tears, even as the economy keeps tanking, the unemployment rate keeps rising, people keep losing their houses. Can this guy fix the economy, or end the Iraq war gracefully, or fix the health-care system? I don't know. I've always leaned towards libertarianism, and I have my doubts about how well he can trudge through the mire of bureaucracy and corruption and governmental incompetence to get anything done, or even whether what he does will work. But you know what? At least he's going to try, and try in good faith. Not to promote his cronies' agenda, not to seize power, not to secure lucrative contracts for his pet companies, but because this shit's broken and he wants to fix it. Because he knows that that's his job.

Obama's heart's in the right place, and god, what a refreshing change it is after eight years of the Bush administration. And while I'm spitting mad about California and Arkansas and Arizona and Florida, about the sign-burning and the Prop 8 protesters who were beaten and arrested by the LAPD, while I'm disappointed in Obama for not speaking out more about things like this, in a way it's a giant relief that he's got more important things to deal with. That my civil rights aren't some political gimmick in a campaign, a wedge issue used to divide up the electorate in lieu of better things to talk about. That "better things to talk about" isn't doublespeak for "your existence embarrasses us, so please look the other way while we let them take away your rights."

So I'm cautiously optimistic. Not that Obama's going to fix everything, but that he at least cares about fixing it. That he values serving the American people above political expediency.

And that, by God, we finally have a president who can speak in public without maiming the English language.

Every time you write gay porn about classic literature, God sends California another absentee ballot voting no on Prop 8.

And we wouldn't want that to happen, would we? So obviously you must all avoid writing any slash about Les Mis. Or Jane Eyre, or Count of Monte Cristo, or Dorian Gray, or Notre-Dame de Paris, or any Woman in White threesomes. And, you know, Aubrey/Maturin might be borderline, so you should avoid it too just in case.

...and every time you write crossover gay porn about classic literature, a couple of those damn queers get married in Massachusetts. Can't you just feel the sanctity of marriage smarting under the blow?

(Come on, guys, help me drown my sorrows in porn. Pretty please.)

Okay, I admit it, I made it all the way to October 31st without assembling a costume, so this morning I threw on all the most elaborately Victorian stuff I could find in my closet, wrestled my hair into a straggly pouf, and went to town on the jewelry and pale makeup. It seems to be working so far, and at least five people have threatened to sneak into my room and steal my corset. But I totally did not have a specific character in mind, so every time someone asks me what my costume is supposed to be, the answer gets more elaborate.

Right now I'm an occultist madwoman who died of consumption in 1887 and was resurrected as a vampire due to my dealings with evil spirits. But I think most people just assume, due to the crazy hair and general stylized waifiness, that I'm movie!Lovett.

Québec review is coming. In the meantime, here's the audio, untracked and in WMA due to my computer's ongoing fail:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/nh7ptw

Les Misérables - Québec City - 19 October 2008 (Closing night)
Gino Quilico (Jean Valjean), Alexandre de Grandpré (Javert), Geneviève Charest (Fantine), Sophie Tremblay (Eponine), Carl Poliquin (Marius), Myriam Brousseau (Cosette), Kevin Houle (Enjolras), Jean-Raymond Châles (Thénardier), Kathleen Fortin (Mme Thénardier)

I can give ensemble information on request, but there was nothing in the playbill about the Gavroche/little Cosette schedules.

Act I is significantly louder (and rather more overloaded) than Act II, because the show was massively over-amplified and I unplugged the microphone at intermission.

Cookies to whoever's willing to track it; cookies and Frenchboy slash to whoever's willing to mail me a CD of the tracked version.

Tags: bootlegs, french, les misérables

Look at the shiny!

Map of Paris with the troop movements from the Revolution of 1830, and daguerreotypes of barricades in the Revolution of 1848.

*droooools*

Tags: abject geekery, les misérables, links

Québec Les Mis was awesome. More details will be forthcoming after I've had some sleep and had time to seethe over the $150 speeding ticket I got for the unimaginable crime of doing 80 on a deserted highway in northern Vermont.

Yeah, my car has cost me more in the past three days than it probably has in the past year. Not particularly happy about that, but it was totally worth it because Les Mis in French. With opera singers and Brick details and historically accurate costuming. I am in looooove.

I was rustling up all the crap I'm going to need to take to Canada with me tomorrow, including my recorder, which still had my Wolf Trap audio on it. I gave it a listen on the WS-100 (computer's sound system is slightly broken) and the quality sounds really nice, if a little echoey. I can't really track it at the moment due to broken sound system, so here it is as a single WMA file. If you want to track it and repost it, I'd give you hugs and e-cookies.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/89imqa

Les Misérables, Wolf Trap, 6 September 2008
Rob Evan (Valjean), Rob Hunt (Javert), Nikki Renée Daniels (Fantine), Jenny Fell