epershand

I have been in read-only mode on the internet for the last week. It's like being in hiding, except you still find yourself with your mouth gaping open about the J2 and Bandom BigBang fails. Except you aren't talking to anyone about it. Whoops.

Now that I'm back, it's really only to say that the day after tomorrow I am going to go almost completely internet-free for the twelve days following that. I'm traveling to Israel, and I will have a cellphone for emergencies, but I decided not to get the data plan, and I will have no computer. Yes, that's right. I am going to Israel, and because I am doing so in the most sheltered way humanly possible (Birthright Israel) my biggest fear is that I'm going cold turkey with the internet. Talk about #firstworldproblems. Trust me, if you're judging me right now, rest assured that I'm judging me more.

I started to write a lot of thinky thoughts that involved contrasting my forthcoming trip to Israel to my trip to Dubai in 2006, but I think that needs a separate post. And it should probably happen after I get back so that the Israel part of the comparison won't be all speculation.

Wow, there was a lot of weekend this weekend. Friday night I had dinner with laurieopal. Saturday I had brunch with karlht and ungelic_is_us, and then I did a bunch of travel prep, and then I went on a used bookstore quest that resulted in no Isherwood but another book about Medieval Islam, and then I was having dinner at a noodle bar and my friend C wandered by and we had a pantomime conversation through the storefront window and I wound up following him to an art gallery opening and then we went to Toy Story 3. Today I did more travel prep, and had something like six short conversations with my parents while they roadtripped through New Mexico and Utah, and then made ginger-peach jam with damned_colonial.

After the jam was done, damned_colonial showed me a whole lot of British tv. The most eye-widening of it was Armstrong and Miller in the RAF talking like modern British teenagers.

I might have to watch Foyle's War after all. Why does all the media that my grandfather gets excited about to the point of tedium always turn out to be really good after all? It's NOT FAIR, I tell you. ::shakes fist::

For some reason, reading The Facts of the MZB Case made me decide to try re-reading Black Trillium again. Now, Lady of the Trillium was one of my favorite books, circa age 14, and I remember being disappointed by Black Trillium because it was riddled with inconsistencies, but WOW. Whoever ghost-wrote that book was seriously phoning it in. It's not so much bad writing as it's just really clear that no one in the process of creating that book gave anything resembling a shit. Wow. Like, the prologue claims to be from the POV of a future historian on the bad guys' side, and is full of prejudice, etc. And then like 7 pages in the author forgets the POV and it turns into a hagiographic birth story of the main characters and starts referring to all the bad guys as evil. I kind of feel offended as a reader, but know that everyone involved in the process laughed all the way to the bank. There are like five sequels and none of them are consistent with each other. Good work if you can get it.

Shoot, am I still writing bullet points? I should be sleeping. Self, get to work on that.

Knowledge, sir! Useful for its own sake, sir!