So, with no further ado, ganking 
warren_ellis's words mercilessly:
Until such time as LiveJournal/Six Apart work out how to tell the difference between fantasy fiction communities/support groups/fashion discussion communities/survivor histories and actual criminal use and traffic, and restore those fiction groups and survivor support teams to full working order, I will produce no new content to be read on LiveJournal.
This dovetails with my paid account going bye-bye. I am also going to stop posting on VOX and have placed a notice about this there as well.
I will be relocating my blogging efforts to Medium//Message, which has heretofore been used only for academic ponderings.
I will still be roleplaying at 
prim_non_noc
and reading certain LJ communities. However, I will not be commenting
on LiveJournal's system, and instead will conduct further discussion in
emails or not at all.
I will continue to syndicate Dido Revisited on LJ.
If I don't have your contact information, now is a good time to give it to me, so I can use email for important things like organizing parties.
I have made bread! And it was good!
(rosemary french bread; could have stood with rising a little longer, and possibly ought to have been in baguettes instead of in round loafs; but it is delicious and I successfully made it!)
Alice is making fun of me right now for being this excited, but I'm serious, this has entirely made my day. Bread is one of those things I was afraid of -- something I couldn't quite believe I would ever be able to make. But now I want to make it every week, to never buy bread from the store again. Why would I ever eat store-bought when I can eat home-made? Why would I want all those preservatives when I can make my whole house smell like rosemary and flour and know exactly what went into it?
So, there's some foods I just never got.
My parents are awesome and fed me great things. But it was a very, very California kitchen. Chez Panisse-inspired. Lots of avocados and Mexican and Caribbean and various asian foods (coconut milk, hello!). But until I moved out I had never eaten:
Anything with molasses in it except gingerbread
collard greens, grits
rhubarb
turnips (or really any root vegetable that wasn't a potato or carrot or beet)
mangos (curiously enough. I didn't know how to pare a mango at all until this year, when I bought one and had to look up how to cut it online.)
To add to that, my mother wasn't a big baker -- she cooks marvelous things, but baking just isn't her thing. My grandmother taught me how to make pies and it turns out I have a knack for pie crust. But on the whole, sweets were limited to a big bowl of ice cream or sometimes store-bought cookies. And frankly -- I'm pretty sure I have still never eaten a vegetable out of a can other than hominy (why did we eat hominy when I was a kid? I honestly don't know. It doesn't seem to fit in with the other things we ate. But to this day hominy is a comfort food to me, prepared right out of the can with butter and salt) and olives (which are not really vegetables) and garbanzo beans. Sometimes I go into the supermarket and marvel at the fact that they can asparagus -- what in the world will they think of next?
So I'm trying to learn how to cook those things I never ate. I'm going to make rhubarb pie, as soon as I get over my fear of it (okay: I'm not even sure I could properly identify rhubarb in a lineup. I just know it's one of those things that a lot of other people seem to have eaten, and it figured prominently in some of my favorite children's books so by hook or by crook I'm going to learn how to cook it). Turnips -- I actually really like turnips in stew, I've discovered. And today I made this molasses coffee cake, which is just like heaven in a pan. I really adore it and frankly, I love molasses now -- I've learned more about it and I just want to put it on everything. The bitter-sweetness is something I had just never encountered anywhere until this year, when my roommates somehow acquired a metric shit ton (that is a scientific measurement, right there) of dark molasses and I felt obligated to learn to use it.
Anyway, I'm pretty excited about all this. Unfortunately most of those things above are pretty wintery foods, but I can at least play with molasses recipes, and if we have a cold snap it would be nice to make root vegetable stew. And mangos are of course something interesting to play with: I wonder how they would bake up?
1. I don't really like custard very much.
2. Spinach rises to the top.
3. Food processors are a gift from God when it comes to crust-making. (I had always just cut in the butter with two knives before, and holy crap, this is so much faster.)
For next time:
1. Be more liberal with the spices. Overspicing is infinitely preferable to flavorless custard, which as we have noted, I don't like very much.
2. Also be less liberal with the milk and more with the eggs. I think that if the quiche was less custardy and more eggy I would have forgiven it a lot in the way of not-enough-spicing.
3. Add more things than just spinach, even if it means you have to walk aaaaaall the way to the fruit stand.
However, I successfully made a savory crust for the first time, and the crust turned out well even if it didn't roll out right or look too pretty; now I know more about how the filling expands, so I will be able to in future figure out how much filling to add better; and it was a Learning Experience. And it was definitely edible, just not terribly good.
Well, and how are things progressing?
That's how I think about things lately: they are progressing. Slowly Alice and I are getting our kitchen in order, lining up spice bottles on spice racks and baking and mixing molasses and sugar to make brown sugar and putting fruit in baskets. It feels luxurious to have a kitchen with fruit in baskets, flour and sugar and rice in jars, frozen fruit in the freezer and fresh fruit in baskets and tinned fruit in the cupboards and veg coming in and out from the fruit stand or farmer's market too quickly to keep in one place. My mother's favorite book growing up was, I guess, the little Golden book The Little Gardeners or something like that -- I don't remember the title. But I do remember the prosperous safe images in it: the gardeners hoeing, packing their produce up in jars and tins, putting it in neat rows on shelves. I don't really think I understood why that idea was so compelling until now.
I've been reading since school got out: The Fountainhead, Captain Blood, Scaramouche, Cold Mountain, The Bewildered. It puts me in a writing mood again, but I am not sure whether to attribute that mood to the reading or to missing Nick. It strikes me that I am always more interested in writing when I'm alone, which is I suppose par for the course. I do it sitting out on the front lawn so I am already browner than last week.
Tomorrow I will walk to Saturday Market with people. I'm looking forward to it, and looking forward to making it a weekly occurrence.
It feels good to have a house that's somewhat in order and, hopefully, a self that's somewhat in order also. I look forward to starting thesis as if from a clean slate.
You know, I'm trying not to be too happy or to dance on his grave. Except that he would probably have been thrilled if a fag-hag like me died, so... have fun down there, Mr. Falwell.
I'm finished.
The paper was 11 pages and I was supposed to be shooting for 15 but god damn, I have thought more about that paper than I have about I think any paper in my academic career except maybe my qualifying exam, and that is saying something. I wrote a note attached that says something like "I hope you realize how formative and awesome this class was, this isn't how I imagined my paper would turn out but I'm actually pretty pleased with the process, anyway thank you." Which is, I guess, how I feel, although I'm afraid it will come off as brown-nosing. Oh well.
And now I am cleaning off my desk, listening to "Lightbulb Sun" and remembering some of the cooler things about last night in this great way. I'm done! I'm done.
(Seriously though. It was so good. I just listened to "Fear of a Blank Planet" and it's actually pretty miserable-sounding in their studio recording -- I don't like the studio version at all. So don't judge it by that. I had forgotten how much more mellow Porcupine Tree actually sounds in the studio, because their concert was in no way mellow. "Blank Planet" at least does a lot better when they're playing it less mellowed-out.)
So tonight I saw Porcupine Tree at the Aladdin.
Holy crap, guys.
1. The opening band, "3," was actually pretty good. Very much a solid sort of rock band, in the old tradition of headbangin' and so on, but good.
2. Allie and Tim stayed in their seats, but Bryan and I went down to the stage before it started. We were perfectly positioned: front row, leaning on the stage. Steven Wilson wasn't just so close I could touch him -- his feet (he plays barefooted, did you know?) were so close that I almost felt uncomfortable and wanted to step back/wanted him to step back. It was one of those things where I was thinking, "Man, I can look up your nose and smell your laundry detergent, this is pretty cool but on the other hand I feel like certain boundaries have been crossed. I'm not supposed to get this close to you even if you're a normal person, and you're a rock star, so I'm definitely not supposed to get this close to you."
3. I am truly horrible: midway through Porcupine Tree's set I realized that everything they are singing, and their videos, are basically about post-human theory and Marshall McLuhan. Particularly the songs off "Blank Planet." I almost wanted to cry because I was being such a nerd -- but damn it, I'm right! It's exciting. I feel like "Halo" is going to be my thesisthemesong.
4. Because we were so close I didn't get the full effect of the videography that was playing behind the band, but during their final encore song "Halo" it was particularly cool. If you were in the balcony, I imagine that the video made it look like Steven Wilson's head was, well, haloed.
5. The roadies gave me Colin Edwin's (the bassist's) pick. I already had his set list (I was so close that I just picked it off the stage after they were done). Bryan got Steven Wilson's set list, but not a pick.
Recently I heard a bad pun via Uncle Sylvia about the "defenestration of prog." To which I say: Okay, but not yet! Give me more Porcupine Tree in concert! Because in September, when they come back through this part of the world, I'm definitely going to drive up to Seattle and then see them the next day in Portland like Bryan and TIm did this time. It will be worth it.
and I just realized that, in fact, the philosophers I'm writing on were doing an INDICTMENT OF ACADEMIA and I HAVE NO BUSINESS WRITING THIS PAPER ON THEM.
I just want to burn my computer at this stage. Except that would mean burning many things I love, like the internet, which (unlike research papers) features birthday cakes, dinosaurs and bikini girls.
It's very difficult for me to write my Religion 301 paper.
I am attempting to draw a method out of the theory of pragmatism, following (of course) the argument Rorty makes: theory should not be a bed on which to lie, it should be a tool with which to shape your own and others' view of the world.
I am then going to envision how it would apply to a real-life study of religion, specifically the study I have been considering for Religion 399 -- a study of online religious communities.
Plenty of problems are going to come up, of course. At least, they're problems as far as I can see: the problem of what to do with the subject of the study (is it ethically right for me to try and convince them of my own point of view about them? But as far as pragmatism goes, radically privileging each person's understanding of right, isn't that what
I'd have to do?) and the problem of "keepin' it P.I. (public intellectual)" as Cornel West would say (mustn't I write my work so that those outside of academia can understand it?).
The paper is, at the very least, going to be an interesting intellectual exercise for me, since I typically consider myself a pragmatist. It will allow me to explore some of the philosophical underpinnings of doing academic work before I have to actually write my thesis, which is going to be very helpful. And even if that wasn't what Mike envisioned when he assigned the paper, I have a hard time bringing myself to feel too bad. I feel like Religion 301 is intended to problematize one's thinking about academic writing just before one embarks on the thesis process -- it's only right that I attempt to apply those lessons as my final paper.
But I am so very tired of writing!
