several reasons to be dehydrated

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Okay. So. This month, recapitulated (for reference on current events in my life see this previous post):

• My parents moved with the rest of my family to Idaho in the first couple of days of this month, while I chose to move into Best Friend's home. My parents came back after a couple of days to continue working on our beat-up, rapidly emptying house.
• I stayed with Best Friend's family for a couple of weeks. My parents stayed with my grandma, who also lives in town. (Happy news: Shortly before I left, Best Friend's family volunteered to foster my dog for a year in hopes that my parents will be able to move into pet-friendly housing next year.)
• About a week ago we called ourselves done with the house and my hometown, leaving my grandma and Best Friend and Best Friend's younger sister to continue what work there was left to be done - mostly painting - to get it into a renting-ready state. Parents and I moved to the parents' student housing in Idaho, where my siblings were still stationed.
• I stayed in Idaho for about five days.
• Mother, Sister and I drove down to southern California starting the 18th, spent the night at a cheap motel in Reno and made it to my college on the 19th according to schedule.
• I am now on my third day of orientation. It has been difficult. Mother had to leave and fly back north yesterday.
• I have never moved before in my life and have now done so three times in one month. (There has been a lot of driving.)
• Sister is breaking down and talking about leaving me, dropping out and going back to Idaho.

    TURNS OUT STRESS PILLS CAN ONLY DO SO MUCH

lemon sorbet for dinner

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    So yesterday I was in the parking lot of a grocery store with my parents, and when I got out of the car I saw a tiny rubbery rhino toy lying on its side in the empty parking space next to us.

    "Mom!" I said. "C'mere! Rhino!"

    She looked where I was pointing. "Oh! Rhino! I think we should rescue it."

    "Yes."

    We put it in our car and went shopping. (Planning, of course, to thoroughly clean it off later.)

    I am now regretting the rescue of this rhino. Because...

 

    This is the creepiest damn rhino you have ever seen. Pictures don't do it justice. My mother says we can paint its eyes to make them all black instead of black with white in the middle, but for now it stares. Wherever one is in the room, it stares at one. Leering.

    The strange horizontal scars don't help anything, either. My sister and I agree that someone must have left it in a parking lot for a reason. (Sister wonders if there used to be a car in that space before suddenly! there was only rhino. However, I was there and saw that the parking space was empty because it was right in front of the store and had potted baby arbor vitae things lined up in it. Perhaps car with rhino in before suddenly! only arbor vitae and rhino?)

and that burnt-orange sky

     Dear Harriet Walter,

    Hrrrrrrg. Have you ever been in a situation where you're suffocating and you desperately need to breathe but you're being held back by your sister who is like "no, I don't want to breathe, I'm bored of breathing, I want to go off and do this other thing instead" and you're like "WOMAN I MUST BREEEEEATHE OR ELSE I MUST DIIIIIIIIIIIEE"?

    And then she's like "pff whatevs" and then you only get to breathe for, like, 40 or (if you're lucky) 80 minutes every day.

    Of course, in this case I could go off and breathe on my own but it would be so much lonelier and less fun.

    (I'm metaphoring about watching Doctor Who. Can you guest-star on it? Please? In fact, you should just be the next companion. For a few seasons. That would be paradise to a brain-'sploding degree.)

This would be my face when I woke up every morning.

(f)red alert!

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    I've had a disgustingly busy and tiring week, but now I'm shivering at home with a cold coming on so I am going to tell you all about the three new-to-me Fred Astaire movies I've seen recently.

    (Today is also the one-year-anniversary of my having seen my very first Fred (and Ginger) movie. Huzzah.)

    Two-sentence-reviews each, I think. I'm not going to give plot synopses because they bore me.

    Royal Wedding (1951, directed by Stanley Donen)

    Charming, funny and comfortably forgettable.

    Also, Fred Astaire dancing on the walls and ceiling because he's in love.

    Silk Stockings (1957, directed by Rouben Mamoulian and also starring Cyd Charisse)

    Sometimes very funny, sometimes rather corny, I liked this movie a lot but it bothered me a bit because it has serious problems with its attitudes towards women, to say nothing of the disrespect for public utilities. The Cole Porter score is generally amazing except for the staggeringly sexist "Without Love", the lyrics of which make it hard to believe this film only came out about half a century ago.

taken from the awesome tumblr astairewashere.

    Finian's Rainbow (1968, directed by Francis Ford Coppola of all people)

 

    Notwithstanding the occasional presence of a charming-if-aged faux-Irish Fred Astaire, this movie is so unspeakably bad that during the two and a half hours my mother and I watched it, my eyeballs gradually withered and began to crawl back into my skull, until they realized that even the darkest darkness inside my body could never enable them to un-see what they were seeing; at that point, they attempted suicide by launching themselves through any passage they could find until they got to my throat, where they burst into flames and dived down to my stomach, hoping for sweet acidic death, but the gory flaming eyeballs proved too much for my already highly nauseated stomach and I ended up violently vomiting out my own charred, bloody eyes along with chunks of my stomach lining all over my own lap, before collapsing in a fitful heap of weeping and gnashing of teeth whilst black blood seeped out of my ears and slowly trickled down to join the oozing mess of escapist body parts already soaking my formerly nice gray skirt. Would not recommend this film.

My face during the whole thing.

Wimsey covers: Clouds of Witness

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Let's look at more Wimsey book covers!

   Clouds of Witness (1926)

    Clouds of Witness doesn't have any really striking or recognizable images in the premise to work with; several of these covers have the theme of "bejeweled kitty" running through them, when they're not just depicting corpses sprawled over things. Which, you know, is all right when it's all right, but...maybe I just don't like having it made so obvious that, like most other people who read these books, I love kitties and corpses, and the publishers totally know that.

    (as before, all descriptions apply to the image preceding them)

    This is the copy of Clouds of Witness which I own. (Not my photograph, though.) It's really beautiful in person; slender, hardcover with shiny gold lettering and beautifully spare. The "best mysteries of all time" thing at the top is a little unsightly, but bearable.

    This is actually one of my absolute favorite LPW covers. Another of the black and white introduction-by-Elizabeth-George editions, its lines are so clean and its contrasts so stark that I feel like if I owned it and could be seen reading it, I would at last be a Real Adult. (I kinda wish the girl was supposed to be Harriet instead of...Mary I suppose it must be, or the sexy-Frenchwoman-lady, but - no wait if it's Mary then why does she have dark hair, is Mary supposed to have dark hair I can't remember, why would she if Peter is blonder than the California sun)

    I can't get a larger image, but I had to include this. It's an audiobook cover, so perhaps it oughtn't to count, but...it's, like, a tiny tiny gun laid on a tiny tiny splash of blood on a monocle. Either that or an enormous monocle with a normal-sized gun and blood splatter. RAD.

     Another audiobook. Um. Okay, for the sake of Justice I did not trust my faulty memory and actually found my copy of CoW and reread the part where Lord Peter falls into a bog. But you know what? My memory did not fail me. Absolutely nowhere in that passage does it say either that an impossibly tiny Bunter was trying to save Lord Peter by holding a twig in his general direction or that the bog was in fact a horrible, oozing pit of oversized intestines.

    This thing, however, is awesome. I love the dramatic colors and the gnarly tree and the misty, sinister cat.

    I think this one is Portugese or something. I adore it. Observe the kitty, the odd red-orange oval (eye?), the magic wand spraying candy and confetti, and the floating head of Mary who is now a ginger. Why is she a ginger? The world may never know.

    This is pretty much exactly the state I plan to be found in when I am dead. Minus the gross maroonish-purple background.
   

    Kitteh!

    Identical kitteh. With bizarre twig-forest in the background.

    I think these editions must have come out post-you and Petherbridge. They basically all have LPW on the cover and usually that LPW looks like Mr Peth.

    Usually.

    would you like some murky with that order of dim

     Isn't this peaceful? I feel soothed.

     Oh and I must not forget there's this. There are a number of Wimsey books done in this style, and I have never ever ever seen a good picture of one. The only pictures are all either tiny or blurry and tiny. This is a shame, as most of them look like they might be handsome if one could actually see the stupid things.

    
     dear sweet heavenly mercy tell me that is not supposed to be lord peter

    LATER UPDATE (3/15/11):
    Whoa hey I forgot this one. Seriously go look at it. Look at her slippers. Dude.

    EVEN LATER UPDATE (7/12/11):
    Is....is this real life? Is this an actual thing?

odwalla

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    How. How do I manage to get several tiny cuts inside my mouth (usually on the roof) when I drink Odwalla drinks. Why does this happen every time.

    It is a fruit purée/juice blend/smoothie. It is not a peppermint candy or a piece of peanut brittle. It does not have "glass shards" listed in the damn ingredients.

    Why does this keep happening to me.

    (ackblthuhagh grahrararar friggin' dude)

willow

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    I think that basically the worst possible noise (not coming from people) one can hear when one is dogwalking into the park on a glorious February morning is the sound of chainsaws.

    The men in the orange jackets came to the park today. They brought their chainsaws with them.

    The men in the orange jackets hate every beautiful thing.

    They killed the willow, Ms Walter. They killed it and chopped it up into lots of ugly, undignified pieces. I don't get it. Why? Why why why why? It wasn't dead. It wasn't intruding onto anyone's property. It was just there, being lovely even without its leaves, standing there on a grassy knoll and being the only willow in the park. And now it's dead.

    My dog and I finished walking our circuit around the park while I fumed. When we got back to the place where the willow once stood, which is close to the park entrance, we saw that the men were packed up and leaving in their big ugly work-crew truck.

    We passed them as they were driving slowly over the merciless speed bumps. I couldn't help noticing that the truck had the word "SHERIFF" emblazoned on its back, and, squinched in on the side, "inmate work crew".

    The man in the orange jacket in the passenger seat leered at me as my dog and I walked by.

    Some people are just good at ruining other people's days.

towering

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    It is a highly disconcerting thing to be peacefully lying in bed after waking up, just lying there and minding one's own business and contemplating the day ahead, and to stretch one's arms a little ways above oneself...and then to have the goshdamned Eiffel Tower fall on one's head.

I feel less safe in my room now.

                                        

    Coincidentally, we have today learned that lamps are dangerous.

dream car

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    I am an ashy rubble heap filled with the unmarked graves of many hopes and dreams.

    My father loves cars. I like cars all right. I like spending time with my dad and listening to him talk. He likes to talk about cars.

    My family owns about three cars and two half-cars (as in, not working too well) at the moment. One of them is my father's car. It is a darling little black Mazda Miata MX-5 from 1996.

    I am learning to drive. I am learning to drive manual cars and am pretty good with the stick-shifting. I have driven this car several times. I love driving this car. I love driving this car.

    Dad and I were talking about Miatas the other day. He wanted to know what my perfect car would be. I gave him a very clear description.

    Last night he found my perfect car on Craigslist.

    It's a Miata just like his. It's from 1992, which was the year I was born. It's French racing blue with a tan interior. It's in wonderful shape. It has a good rollbar installed already. It is gorgeous. It is gorgeous. Miatas aren't fancy, but this one is absolutely perfect in my eyes.

    It is three thousand dollars, which is not at all bad for what it is. My family does not have three thousand dollars on hand. My family is poor.

    I want this car so badly.

    Last night I busied myself with dreaming of how it would be surprise-gifted to me for my birthday, and with trying to decide whether I would name it Belinda, Georgiana or Simone.
    Therefore the denial is only now wearing off, and right now I am huddled into a little quivering ball of unhappy, and Reality is beating at my brain with the ugly, rusted hammer of practical thinking.

    My brain does not care overmuch. My heart is the one aching.

[UPDATE the next day:
It's gone, man. It's gone.
Love was not enough.]

more of The Price

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    So, as one might expect, my sister and I have been watching your miniseries The Price (1985) over the past week or two. It's been...interesting.

    Like, it was all super slow moving for ages, all middle-aged men yakking and your character being beautifully kidnapped and goin' slightly loopy locked up in a dirty Irish basement, then suddenly the end of episode 4 comes and we're like OHAAAAAAUUUUUGH NO OHEMGEE TRAUMA ALERT TRAUMA ALERT TRAUMA TRAUMA TRAUMA ohhhhh the bastard's gonna use that knife oh girl

    And tonight we watched episode 5. I AM SO TRAUMATIZED RIGHT NOW ABOUT THE FINGER AND THE ENDING I WOULD HAVE BEEN CRYING AND BLEEDING FROM THE EYEBALLS AT THE SAME TIME IF I WASN'T TOO STUNNED TO DO ANYTHING MORE THAN CHOKE WITH SPEECHLESS MISERY ON MY ANTI-TRAUMA HAM AND PICKLE.

    Fuck.

    My sister and I agree that there is not much to be done at this point for a proper ending except kill everyone. We'll probably watch the final episode, 6, tomorrow, but before we do I think I need to try and record parts of our traumatized consultation over ham/cheese/pickles. (Asterisks denote a skip to a different part of the conversation.)

    Sister: Frank needs to die.
    Me: Violently. With lots of blood and pain and slow suffering.
    Sister: Who should kill him? Clare?
    Me: Clare. With bits of the jigsaw puzzle.
    Sister: But they've already got Harriet's shiv.
    Me: All right, she'll kill him with Harriet's shiv and then stuff the jigsaw puzzle bits in the wounds.
    *
    Sister: Nobody cared that Andrew died!
    Me: Yeah, nobody gave a damn about that! They're like oh yeah whatever it was an accident, let's talk about money.
    Sister: Poor Andrew.
    *
    Me: Frank needs to die. Everybody should die.
    Sister: Clare should just kill everyone.
    Me: Including herself. And her mom.
    Sister: And Geoff. And Margaret.
    Me: And the police.
    *
   ****(edit: further speculative bit removed - 7-21-11)

    I expect that the actual end of the actual series will not be anywhere near as satisfying.

kill, clare, kill!

                                                     

Audible 2

(written at a previous date, and also being a continuation of the previous post)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    I hate that Audible's selection of Wimsey stuff is almost entirely Ian Carmichael-centric. They've got, like, ONE Petherbridge-narrated book, and it's the effing Attenbury Emeralds. Come on.

    My library has Strong Poison and Have His Carcase as done by Mr Peth on tape. I've listened to both of them. They're abridged. In Strong Poison, among other things Charles and Mary's romance is completely cut out, poor dears, much like in the miniseries, which makes the end of the book rather abrupt. (Something about Sylvia or Eiluned saying how Lord Peter's too much of a gentlemen to present himself to be thanked and Harriet will have to go to him herself, and Harriet is like, "Oh, I won't do that," and then silence and the listener goes "wait wut".)

    The Have His Carcase audiobook is a bit anxiety-making when one can tell that lots of things are being left out but one can't remember quite what. (I've only read the book through once, as it's long and difficult and I've only been a Wimsey convert for about a year.) Though there's a very amusing bit, I remember, in the middle or near the end, when Lord Peter receives a prettified copy of the coded letter found on the body from the police, and he takes it to Harriet, and talks to her a little teeny bit about what sort of code he thinks it might be...and then he takes off to go see a man about a horse or something, and he comes back the next day and Harriet has cracked the fucking thing by herself. She sits on the floor and reads the decoded letter to Lord Peter. It's amazing.

    I love Edward Petherbridge's rendition of Harriet. It's so soft and husky and just a little bit breathy. Deeper than his Peter-voice.

    What was I going to say? Oh, yes. I haven't heard any audiobooks of Gaudy Night. I can't listen to Ian Carmichael be involved with Gaudy Night. He's just not romantically appealing in the least, and Gaudy Night is a special special thing to me. (I almost recall something about the Carmichael version having Joanna David involved? Was it dramatised? Sigh, my memory, she is barely civil to me.)

    I haven't heard the Petherbridge version either, partly because it's gosh-derned difficult to get one's hands on and partly because apparently it lasts two hours.
    Two hours.
    Gaudy Night.
    Gaudy Night in two hours.
    I don't even....how? Not even the miniseries managed to cut it down that bad. I mean, what did they do to get it that short? What could be left? What is even the point?

    I'll probably still find it sometime, though. What time I do devote to morbidity and literary masochism, to be sure.

    I'm sorry this letter/post is so jerky and wandering. I have a cold. I think I mentioned that earlier. I need somebody to make me tea and everyone is either off grocery shopping, at work or useless at teamaking. Sigh.

rotten

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Leaving aside such independent variables as tiredness, cold and hunger, is there any fouler way to be in a truly rotten mood than both being in a truly rotten mood and having "Top Hat, White Tie and Tails" stuck in one's head?

    I have serious doubts.

sleepwear

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Damp pajama bottoms are horrific. It's a kind of betrayal. One spends fourteen exhausting hours in too-tight clothing and one wishes to slip into one's super-comfy tartan lumberjacky jams at the end of the  day, and then they are insufficiently dry because one's sister did the laundry this time and failed at it.

    Fourteen hours in the wrong bra is also horrific.

Chem lab

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Today (11/23/10) has been One Of Those Days so far. If I didn't have a sense of humor and a proper appreciation of quality pathos, days like this would just send me over the brink like a protagonist in an H.P. Lovecraft story.

    I won't go into painstaking detail, but it's worth noting that I did not get enough sleep at all, my contacts refused to get along with my eyes leaving said eyes blithering with pain and irritation and redness and weepery and I had to resort to my super ugly glasses, almost all the other schools and universities in the state are delayed or closed because of the weather but HERE in this town it's just cold enough to make the world absolutely frigid but not icy/snowy enough to merit the academic cry to abandon ship. (I suppose at this point I should clarify something - I'm no longer in high school, I was homeschooled all my life, I'm going to college next year, a year later than most people go to college, and I'm taking a chemistry class at my local uni to have another science credit on my homeschool transcript. Chemistry lab was where I was headed today.)
    By all the God-fearing lemurs of the earth, it was cold outside. No numbers to brag about, really, just cold and penetrating, the kind of cold that makes one's eyeballs ache and one's overlong nose turn red and drip something fierce, like a tomato golem who's just been stabbed lots like Julius Caesar.

    Oh, it was snowing a little when I was walking to campus, too. Pretty, delicate, Hollywood snow that is all like "hahaha look at me I am so innocuous, I could never do anyone harm, you are just a shivering weakling" because I am something of a shivering weakling, I really don't think I produce as much body heat as everyone else does, like I'll take people's recently vacated computer chairs and be like "is your ass a hot water bottle by any chance, this chair is super warm" but anyway.

    So I got to chemistry lab. My lab partner never showed up, so I had to work with someone else whose partner was also not there, and I can't really blame the people who skipped because today we were analyzing urine.

    It was synthetic urine, of course, but I still really do not care to relive that part in detail. I am not a person comfortable with bodily fluids even if they have never been inside a body.
    One point, though. I think I mentioned H.P. Lovecraft protagonists before. I will carry that simile.

    There was a moment, at the end, when we were cleaning up. Different Lab Partner - we will call her BD - was throwing away the droppers and pH papers and things, and I was rinsing out the test tubes containing our urine samples. (We'd had to do six tests, so that ends up as twelve tubes, six small six large.)
    You know that moment in Lovecraft stories - I am assuming you've read them because it saves me explaining - when the hero has been through some scary stuff already and he's wavering a bit, and the climax comes when the guy sees/hears/interacts with/whatever something so wrong, so literally unfathomable, so blasphemous and shattering and awful that he simply cannot process it, and his mind breaks and then there's all the shrieking and flailing and fleeing into the night and so on? That was what it was like when I tipped over one of the large test tubes into the sink, one of the samples we'd heated in warm water for a few minutes, and nothing happened.
    I shook the tube. I ran water into the tube. Nothin' doin'.
    "Becca," I croaked to BD as she returned from dumping things in the trash. "I'm scared." I shook the tube as it was upside down again to illustrate.
    "Oh," she said. "That's gross."
    It was a bit hazy from there on. I remember BD got me a little wire scrub-brush from the other DI sink, and I thanked her and used it and the congealed urine began to come out of the tube in clots, and I died a little inside and kept cleaning tubes.
    There was only the one completely solid sample, but it was the first one I did. The unheated samples were still totally liquid, of course, and some of the heated ones were liquid with occasional clots.

    By now, I am coherent enough to write, obviously, and this is because I have had a very hot hot cocoa with extra hot, and I have listened to a couple old songs sung by Fred Astaire because Fred Astaire is the bomb. I talked to my parents about the lab, because they know I have Issues, but writing is my natural creative medium and I have recently decided that creative expression is probably going to be my most powerful weapon against insanity.

    (I have also recently decided that insanity comes in many, many forms.)