The washing machine is broken.

It's an old one, but D and I put a load in before he left, and it was soapy and wet yesterday when I went to go dry it, so I figured that I'd made a mistake in setting the machine. I put it on for another short cycle. Today, when I checked the machine, it's full of water and clothes, and there's water leaking out the bottom.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck...

This isn't happening.

At least the water's going down the drain. I've e-mailed him the whole shitty story, and I hope he doesn't freak out on me. I'm always scared of people yelling at me... there have been people in my life that freaked out at me and held a grudge over a broken glass or a lost button, let alone a major appliance.

Mom seems to think it needs a new pump, which is a simple enough repair, she says. It still doesn't make me any happier.
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Chelle *who needs a Klingon backbone right now...*

Who's seen Season 6 Episode 4 (Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy)?

If you haven't, but you're a Voyager fan and a music fan, you have to get me to send you this episode. The Doctor's daydreaming of having a recital wherein he's singing La donne e mobile from Rigoletto, and Tuvok freaks out because his Vulcan instinct drives him to mate. The Doctor improvises thus to calm him down:

( Read more... )

I find it hilarious. If you don't, well, you suck. Or you just don't like opera. Or you just don't like Voyager. Or you probably hate the Doctor. Whatever it is, you need to run a diagnostic on your humour subroutines if you don't.

D comes home today, so I'm on a cleaning and laundry spree.
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Chelle

D and I watched Farinelli last night, which rekindled my interest in everything genderbending in opera (not that it was ever extinguished.) This evening, after I had slogged through my German homework again, I looked up the last known and recorded castrato - Alessandro Moreschi.

Gary Day had mentioned him in my MUS 120 class in first year, and played a portion of his recording. I went to amazon.ca and looked up Moreschi's record. I began to listen to song samples (found here) as I looked at a few pictures of him.

He had lived with poor health his whole life, no doubt due to poor fat distribution and a weak heart. The Vatican outright outlawed the practice of castration in 1870s, only a few short years after he was snipped as a young boy. He enjoyed a career as a soloist and director of the Sistine Chapel choir, but he was the last of the castrati, after all. After he retired, they made a bunch of crappy recordings of him singing - crappy because the technology they had was practically Bedrock in nature and because he was way past his performance prime.

I have little tears in my eyes now over it. It's bad enough when someone is socially stigmatized for voluntary re- or deconstructive surgeries that will improve their quality of life, such as sex reassignment surgeries, but when one "fixes" what ain't broke on a child without their consent... so he got a job out of it... big deal. He got some fame out of it... big deal. His parents, choral director and the local barber's straight razor decided what to do with his body for the sake of keeping his glorious soprano... even though, listening to the recording, it's apparent that the beauty of his voice was fleeting, like anything else.

Oh, I'm just being a big pussy now. I'm going to go and pat my piggy.
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Chelle

Ok, it's time for Folkfest Day 3. wind_dork wrote a very accurate report of Day 1, and we both could sum up Day 2 in fewer than 5 words (heh.)

Tonight, the fair Sarah and I will be gracing the stage with our klezmer chops (her on clarinet, me on bass) with the Saskatoon Klezmer Band. It'll be grand.

I'm feeling an incredible brain-drain right now. I don't think I've quite recovered from this past summer... I've done and seen so much, and I'm sort of on a serious downtime. Forgive my inanity.
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Chelle

Sorry, all... I haven't checked my friends page in at least two weeks, and there are only a few people whose actual journals I visit (it's not that the rest of you aren't special, but for some reason I'm just compelled to discriminate like that... hehe.)

There isn't much to report. I've sort of met someone that I think could actually hold my attention longer than a few weeks or so, and, so far as I know, he responds to his e-mails. Oh, stop quivering and get used to the male pronoun in this context... I'm sick and tired of being unhappy and having to hide from biphobic pricks within my own community. Biphobic prick, are you? Clear off, then.

That said, I have a funny story. Well, I think it's funny, anyhow...

I was writing my Sociology final today in Quance Theatre. Before answering the question on breaching experiments (ex. farting loudly in the grocery store and shouting, "HoooWHEE! what a ripper!" and gauging people's reactions to this level and area of deviant behaviour) I left the auditorium to get a DC. Completely ignoring the NO FOOD OR DRINK sign, because I really needed the caffeine, I sat in my seat and opened it.

Later, whilst finishing the question, I reached for the bottle, which was sitting on the floor. The cap came off and I spilled about half of the contents on the concrete floor. Nonplussed, I pulled an enormous freaking maxi pad out of my purse, unwrapped it and stuck it to the bottom of my foot to blot up the mess. Surprisingly enough, those diaper-sized fuckers really CAN hold a lot of liquid. Hurrah for context! It's all about CONTEXT!

Not only that, but I could tell who around me had been listening when she was talking about breaching experiments (and who didn't take it as news that such a thing exists when she did, ie. the social scientists in the crowd.) They tended to smile and pull out scraps of paper to, presumably, write what I had done on them. Even my prof laughed and took note.

The only thing that sucks with a breaching experiment in a Sociology classroom is that you don't get the same reaction as you would with Joe Schmo from Kokomo. Generally people have either desensitized to "other"wise behaviour, to Butlerize, or they want to go and try it for themselves.

Ho hum. I'm starting to even bore myself. My mother said that I have to stop reading such boring books... but I still went and bought a brand-spanking new copy of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble yesterday on the way to meet David. Meow.

I'm out (and boring to boot.)
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Chelle

I had a bit of a brainstorm in class whilst talking about Foucault and the danger of language/discourse and systemic modernity...

"Discourse in the hands of postmodernity and poststructuralism is to take a shining marble plinth of a modernist, scientific, theoretical approach to the "truth" and throw an unpinned grenade at it. When the parts fall and one has taken a walkabout amongst them, thinking and theorizing and deconstructing, the point is not to create a new beacon of truth, another locked discursive box, but to survey the fractured mess and say, "Yeah - that'll do."
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Chelle
PS If anyone uses that for any purpose, I will have your head. Not that you'd want to, of course, since it's just crappy ramblings at 9am before the coffee kicks in, but hey... some people would think it's kinda smrt-sounding, I guess... if you're not actually disciplined enough to pick up a damn book. ;)