One Day I Wrote Her Name Upon the Strand
By Edmund Spenser
One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washèd it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide and made my pains his prey.
Vain man (said she) that dost in vain assay
A mortal thing so to immortalise;
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eke my name be wipèd out likewise.
Not so (quod I); let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame;
My verse your virtues rare shall eternise,
And in the heavens write your glorious name:
Where, when as Death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.
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Today was writing and shopping and organizing and not getting behind, which in and of itself is an accomplishment these days. Also getting older son's report card, which was not nearly bad enough to have been thrown out, though he was correct that he was losing weekday GameCube privileges until that C has come up. Am thinking that I should make him write essays or fanfic or something creative based on the games, since barring him from playing them altogether cuts into his social life and his down time. Is this foolish and counterproductive? He spent all night making a web page on AOL to link to his favorite game sites, and I am teaching him a little HTML, so it's not all bad...
This week's Enterprise review, as we head into the home stretch: "United, just as derivative as last week and more gratuitous violence -- nothing that really made me sob about the cancellation -- but rather enjoyable, and Reed is so completely in love with Tucker that I even mentioned it in my review and will get lots of hostile homophobic mail tomorrow. I also threw in a feminist rant for good measure. And in an editorial, I confessed that I suspect Manny Coto is not the messiah.
1. Titanic. Saw it long after everyone else, was warned that I would hate the historical innacuracies, would hate the framing story, would hate Leo, would hate the song...wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong. I really loved it.
2. Hannah and Her Sisters. Seen under duress under pressure from my college roommates after I swore off Woody Allen forever because The Purple Rose of Cairo made me so mad that I didn't think I could sit through anything of his again. I despised the idea of a filmmaker making a film about a woman screwed over by filmmakers and film fantasy, and it was only much later that I realized that the filmmaker's point of identification is not with the powerful producers and the asshole star, but the woman sobbing in the audience. Hannah, and the storyline in which Allen's character is going to kill himself until he sees the Three Stooges, saved him for me, and thank goodness too or I'd have missed Crimes and Misdemeanors and Shadows and Fog.
3. The Prophecy. I thought it would be a bad horror movie, and I hate horror movies and I hate bad films about religion. I thought Viggo Mortensen's screen time would be the only five minutes I enjoyed in the entire film and that Christopher Walken would creep me out. I could not have been more wrong in every way.
4. Joe vs. the Volcano. I don't really like Tom Hanks. I don't really like Meg Ryan. It looked really silly, but
5. Gangster No. 1. You can read about this one in my LJ memories too, though I think it's filed under "Russell Et Al" (poor Paul Bettany, still an accessory of Russell Crowe's in my memories, heh -- well, he did say he was Russell's bitch forever). I was informed by many people that it was horribly violent and that Paul played a completely despicable character. And this is quite true, but no one mentioned to me that the entire plot of the film was about how Paul Bettany is obsessively in love with David Thewlis, to the point of fetishizing his tie tack and wanting to run his hands over his clothes. I didn't really notice the bloodshed because I was too busy drowning in my own drool.
1. Have you ever tried meditation? Several different kinds.
2. Do you pray? I more argue in my head with whatever higher power might be listening. *g* I don't really believe in a god who intervenes in human affairs, so it's more me imagining what I wish such a god would say (and such a god always takes the form of a hippie Jesus which is very disconcerting to a Jewish girl like me, not to mention the fact that the goddesses who live in my head tend to be fierce and scary). When I am in a total panic, I have been known to pray in Hebrew, though, which I find a tiny bit disturbing.
3. Worst nightmare: Involves my kids and a mall fountain that they are thankfully now too old to drown in, and I don't want to talk about the details because they're too awful.
4. Do trolls live under your bed? If they can live in the middle of all that clutter and an occasional visit from a cat, more power to them.
5. Make a wish: Everyone in the world suddenly comes to their senses, works to protect the environment, share resources, celebrate one another's cultures instead of fearing or trying to change them.
1. How old were you when you got your drivers license? 16. Failed the test the first time by knocking over a cone on the three-point turn.
2. Did you get your own car right away, use the family car, or bum rides from friends? Family car (Chrysler LeBaron) till I was out of college.
3. What was your first car and what was it like? 1988 Toyota Corolla, LE model because the person who had put the down payment on it didn't end up buying it for some reason. Ran like a dream, surprisingly roomy for such a small car, great stereo, never gave us a minute's trouble.
4. How old were you when you got your first traffic ticket and what happened? Lake Shore Drive in my 20s. I had the misfortune of being in the left lane when all the traffic was running five miles over the speed limit, so I got pulled over. Fortunately, in Illinois, you can go to a driver's ed refresher course instead of getting a ticket so it's not on my record.
5. What is your favorite car story, be it an accident, road trip, etc? You mean besides the lamppost falling on my practically brand new minivan? Probably driving the other minivan from home to L.A. to Seattle and back to DC.
And not a Friday Five but gacked from all over:
Name five fictional characters upon whom you have had a crush:
I don't think I have ever had a crush on someone who only existed in a printed text. My imagination is too non-visual, too non-auditory, and apparently I need to have those things for a full-fledged crush. So while there are many characters I adored in novels, I am sticking to the ones I actually had crushes on.
1. Captain James T. Kirk from Star Trek. I trust this is completely self-explanatory, unless you're from another planet or something.
2. Han Solo from Star Wars. Another that really should be self-explanatory, though to quote
3. Greta Vandemann from The Competition. If she had been my piano teacher, I would never have quit piano. Then again, if Lee Remick had been my road to ruin in Days of Wine and Roses I would probably never have quit drinking.
4. Sue Ellen Ewing from Dallas. Please don't ask me to explain, because I can't. I only know that I adored her with an absurd intensity.
5. Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica. The REAL Starbuck from the REAL BSG. Yes, I realize how cheesy the show was. Doesn't change anything.
Oh, also, one more thing on recs? There is nothing quite like the pain of seeing a story on someone's rec list that pretty straightforwardly plagiarized from you, to the extent that other people mentioned it to you completely unsolicited and then you knew you weren't crazy, particularly when your own fic didn't make the list. I tend not to call anyone on plagiarism unless it's word for word, because we're all in a morally ambiguous area, using other people's characters and plots and ideas. But that just rankles.
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