Friends

My kids now have a Betta fish named Jackson. I left my ex* and the kids in PetSmart for five minutes to get something from OfficeMax and they go get a fish! Well, I said I would get them a fish eventually so it's all good.


*I am going to start referring to ex number one as Russ or R from now on. He is more of a friend now than an ex really.

Also I got tagged and I will get to it tomorrow. I have to work on a project now.

Also, my Dad is in the hospital. :( He is doing ok right now. He just has pneumonia on top of other respiratory issues. He's been in since Thursday and should be out in the next few days.

Title: Winter Song
Author: _usakeh_
Genre: Drama, Hurt/Comfort
Word Count: ~7500
Summary: “You’ve already done everything you can. You’ve done more than you should have, really.” Remus watched as Sirius stepped over to the desk, picked up a pencil and began playing with it. Nervously, Remus dug his nails into the palms of his hands and added, “Plus, it’s really not that bad.”

“Rubbish, Remus.” Sirius snapped the pencil he was holding in two and flung the halves into their garbage can before continuing, “Do you really think that you can get away with saying that? How long have we known each other?”

“You’re right.” Remus sighed and dug his nails harder into his palms, so much so that they began to bleed slightly. “So it is pretty bad. But there’s nothing you can do about it, unfortunately.”
Author's Note: This was written for the rs_games.

( Winter Song )

I see every moment, every instant, every stumble and stammer and delight and laugh, and I take them all and weave them into a pattern I can understand. We are here to learn. We are the universe discovering itself. We forget who we are to ourselves and to each other. Every time we hate, or wound, or condemn, we bleed a little more until we forget what we were supposed to be doing in the first place. Sometimes we need that.
I still don't understand the point of You versus Me or Us versus Them.

Pain flaring everywhere, but it's all right. Took a photo of my scarred face with no concealer, but it's all right. Alone for the night, but it's all right. It is wonderful.

Full stop.

The people that made the original Lady Gaga as an illuminati puppet have released another groundbreaking analysis of Lady Gaga's video "Bad Romance."



( I believe every word of this article )

Recently I got interested in Buddhism, and one thing that intrigues me is Buddhist art. Specifically, the representation of the Buddha himself, Siddhartha Gautama. Doing a Google Images search for "Buddha" will bring up a lot of versions of this fat, laughing guy, sometimes sitting on a pile of money:






That's not the Buddha at all. That's a guy named Bodai. I can see how you would mix it up, but yeah. Bodai (or Hotei, if you're Japanese) is a good-luck statue in the Asian world, because the stomach is the center of spirituality and therefore rubbing his stomach will bring you good luck and riches or something.

"Buddha" is a title that means "the Enlightened One" or actually more like "The Awakened One" or "The One Who Is Awake." The whole point of Buddhism is that anyone can achieve enlightenment and become a Buddha themselves. Siddhartha, the founder of Buddhism, didn't consider himself to be the first Buddha or the last, or even probably the only Buddha at that time, though I don't know that for sure. But in the West, when most people say "Buddha" they're talking about Siddhartha Gautama. Or that fat guy.

You see a lot of representations of him in Buddhist paintings and sculpture, and he pretty much always looks the same:



They make you go, "Hey, that's Buddha." I mean, he's portrayed pretty consistently. You've got Buddhas sitting in a lotus position, like above. You've got standing Buddhas:

And, my favorite, reclining Buddhas:

Anyway, I was wondering if there was something written down about the Buddha's appearance. Siddhartha Gautama probably died around 400 B.C. and the Buddhist teachings didn't get written down until about 400 years later, so I don't think they'd be really accurate or anything, but I was curious to see what was considered important to how he looked. For one thing, he always has really long earlobes. It's freaky. Well, I looked it up, and did he ever: 32 main characteristic and 80 minor ones. They're really specific, too:

He can touch his knees with the palms of his hands without bending.

What, like ... he's a gorilla? I just checked and my palms are about a foot above my knees. He must have had really long arms.

The distance from hand-to-hand and head-to-toe is equal (Pali: nigrodhaparima n dalo). Note: incidentally, these are also the ideal proportions according to Vitruvius, and depicted in Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.

Okay, maybe not! Incidentally, most people have a wingspan equal to their height. It's a rubric I learned in art class. Go measure your wingspan and tell me if you're proportional!

I don't see how he can do the palms-to-knees thing, though. Unless he had a really short torso or something.

He has an immense torso, like that of a lion

Oh, I give up.

His sexual organs are concealed in a sheath and exudes a pleasant odor similar to vanilla

Better get that looked at, dude.

His skin is the color of gold

What, literally?

His body hair is blue-black, and curls clockwise in rings

See, this just proves that the Buddha was good-looking. Someone stared at him long enough to notice the direction his body hair was curling.

His body hair are separate with one hair per pore

... and to map his pores. Sheesh. Isn't one hair per pore what's supposed to happen anyway?

He has a nice smile

This part was written by Buddha's mom.

He has very blue eyes

Finally. A detail I can visualize.

The 80 minor details are even crazier, like number 16 "His navel is without blemish" or 22, "His skin is thick or thin as it should be," and that's where we find the detail that the earlobes should be long "like lotus blossoms" and that he should be emanating a glow "extending around him for two feet."

Okay, so I'm joking around, but the truth is very little of this was meant to be taken literally. It's all symbolic. The hand gestures and position of his body all have different meanings, as do all his weird features. It's like a halo drawn around the Virgin Mary in a medeaval painting. Nobody thought that Mary actually glowed; it's a <i>representation</i> of her holiness. I'm sure everything recorded has a symbolic meaning, I just don't know what, exactly. I heard the long ear lobes represent wisdom.

The thing I do get are the <i>mudras.</i> The position of the hands has a specific meaning. The seated Buddha's hands indicate that he is meditating. The standing Buddha's gesture is of charity, I guess, though it's kind of small so it's hard to see what he's doing with his hands. Another common <i>mudra</i> is that of the index finger and the thumb touching on one or both hands, palms out, and is the gesture of teaching. I think it's cool that you can pack so much meaning into an image with such little things.

My favorite thing about the Buddha images are his expression, though. He always looks so kind and compassionate. I want to get a little Buddha statue for my desk now.

A big hey-o to everyone on my f-list! Sorry I haven't been keeping up to date with comments this week! I'm up to my neck in wool again. Every year I make my neices and nephew a sweater for Christmas, and this year I've left it late again. So I'm making myself crazy again.

Tuesday I had a brainstorm, and instead of taking money and time I don't have to go back down south to see my doctor, (I need a refil on tranks and painkillers) I thought I would call down and see if they could call the repeat in. His secretary said, "Fax a request to the office, he can sign it, and then we'll fax it to the pharmacy". Okay! Saves me $200 and 16 hours of drive time, plus whatever happens up here while I'm gone, because it seems that if I go anywhere for more than 4 hours all hell breaks loose. I called the pharmacy up here. Since they haven't filled a scrip of mine for the heavy stuff, I have to call the pharmacy down south, have them fax the request, and then have the doctor fax it up here. So I make the phone calls.

Houston was supposed to be off work on Thursday and Friday because the mills are still closed for deer season. So on Thursday I decided to go to Sudbury to do a little shopping. I got the wool for Alexi's sweater, but I didn't get enough. So I take Houston's car, my CDs, and take off at noon. Had a blast! Went to the bookstore, found a present for Joy and Chris, but they were all out of the wool I needed at Micheals. Not a biggie. I decided just to do the sleeves in a different colour. When I get home, I find out that they called Houston in to work right after I left. Houston didn't tell Ol' HD where I'd gone. So nobody went to pick up poor Tris from band practice. Which is when I found out that everything goes to hell when I"m not here.

Friday was a disaster. Someone ran off with my crochet hooks, you can't buy one in this town, I took all the kids to the store with me. Big mistake there. Tris and Bree are in full "I'm going to bug my sibling" mode. Cade kept wandering off on me. Plus I'm having a panic attack on top of it all. I"m waiting in line, there's a gentleman in front of me with a little girl of about two and a baby in a carry chair. I'm thinking back to when mine were that well behaved, back before the aliens took their brains. He was looking at me with sympathy.

So while we are waiting to pick up our chicken, I've got Cade saying, "MomI'mgoingtodieifIdon'tgetadrinkrightnow!" over and over. Gwen is holding a bag, and Bree and Tris are doing mortal combat moves. Bree comes up and says, "Ma! Tris won't act like PopInFresh!" I snap back "I'm gonna pop the pair of ya! Knock it off!" Man in front of me looks even more sympathetic. Turns out he's Bree's English teacher. *sigh*

I ended up locking myself in the bathroom and reading COSMO of all things. I've learned 72 new ways to please my man. I've learned I need to wear teal eyeshadow. I've learned that my kids can pick locks with my crochet hooks. (That's where they went!) But eventually they all went to bed, and I watched "The Commitments", which always makes me feel better.

Tomorrow they all go back to school, thank heavens. I got bit by an Evil Plot Bunny. I think I've got it beaten and locked into a cat carrier, but I may just have to start writing bad Boromir/Legolas slash, where Legolas is Teh Ebil! and just toys Boromir, who falls head over heels with the otherworldly beauty of the elf...

I just finished a novel written in 1948. One character is described as too shy to come out when people are in the house, as having no friends, as having strange obsessions and as having odd eating habits.
Asperger's was described in 1945 but it was hardly well known. I suspect the author must have known someone or heard of someone with the condition. I found it interesting and thought this community would too.

Course registration for next semester opened on November 4th and closed on Friday. It was pretty stressful trying to choose courses, not only because I couldn't just pop in on my dean or my major advisor since I'm on the other side of the world, but also because for a while Advanced Chinese wasn't showing up on the tri-co course guide. My major advisor told me the reason it didn't show up was because there were some kinks that needed to be sorted out with the course.

I always choose my courses based on what fits around Chinese class, so this semester it was especially difficult, not to mention that I was also panicking slightly the entire time because THERE WAS NO ADVANCED CHINESE LISTED AT ALL.

Luckily I'm more than halfway done with my major requirements, so I don't have to stress about courses too much, but I still need to take two 300-level seminars before I graduate. This upcoming semester there are only two offered. One I have absolutely no interest in. The other one seems OK, but it meets on Fridays from 1-4pm.

There was a course I really wanted to take at Swarthmore, too, which was the only interesting-sounding East Asian Studies course in the entire Tri-co, but I didn't know if I could take it, because I wasn't sure if it would conflict with Chinese.

Anyway, after a frantic email to my dean and my major advisor asking their advice and what the hell happened to Advanced Chinese, I just signed up for 4 kind of random courses, because I wanted the stress of registration to be over with, and it's kind of hard to focus both on the goings-on with CET and everything back at Bryn Mawr.

Last night, I decided to check out the course guide to see if Adanced Chinese was listed. It is. Now I'm upset, though, because not only am I not signed up for it now, since course registration closed on Friday, it also conflicts with the Swarthmore course I really wanted to take.

So right now my schedule is a mess. I signed up for Supervised Work for Chinese, since Advanced wasn't showing up, Phonetics and Phonology (which I actually do want to take, and luckily it doesn't conflict with anything), The Chinese Revolution (which I'm not sure about, but I'll see after I shop it in the spring), and a random Religion course that seemed sort of interesting.

So now I'm incredibly unsure about what to do, and most of this stuff isn't going to be able to be fixed until I get back to Bryn Mawr, but there are several things I'm pondering right now.

In conclusion, there are 5 courses I'm going to sign up for during add/drop period, and I need to figure out which one to drop, though Advanced Chinese is definitely staying in my schedule, and Phonetics and Phonology probably will as well, but here's everything else I'm thinking about:

-No matter how I end up arranging it, my schedule is going to be pretty good. The earliest class I will have is an 11:30am class at Haverford.

-If I drop The Chinese Revolution, which meets MW 2:30-4, I'll only have one class on those days, and my day will end at 2:00pm. I'll also have all my classes at Haverford, which will be pretty cool. I did one semester with three courses at Haverford already, and considering the layout of my schedule, four courses won't be a problem. I have Chinese at Haverford ending at 2:00 before The Chinese Revolution at Bryn Mawr starting at 2:30, which means that I MUST catch the 2:05 blue bus after class, and Huang Laoshi has a tendency to run over a few minutes, although with Bryn Mawr time I might still be able to get to class on time taking the 2:10 sweeper.

The Chinese Revolution, also, is only a 200-level class and I already fulfilled my 200-level requirement, but I might be able to turn it into a 300-level course with permission from Professor Jiang.

Another thing I'm a little hesitant about is because I already took a course with Professor Jiang, who's teaching The Chinese Revolution. I didn't really like the class and I found his lectures a little boring, but since it was his first semester at Bryn Mawr and I heard he's better at upper-level courses (I took a 100-level with him), I'm willing to give him another chance. To be fair, though, he's incredibly nice.

-If I drop Jerusalem: City, History, and Representation, I'll only have one class on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and it won't meet until 2:30. I can't say too much else about it because I don't know anything about the professor. A religion class might be kind of cool, though.

-If I drop Topics in Comparative History, I won't have class on Fridays at all. It's a 300-level course, though, which I need for my major, and if I take it I won't have to work on changing a 200-level course into a 300-level course. But I won't have class on Fridays.

Also, the course is taught by Professor Smith. I hated him when I took a 100-level course with him freshman year, but when I took Sophomore Seminar with him last year I liked him better. He assigns lots of reading, though (usually 50-100 pages per night, even in his 100-level course), and he's an incredibly hard grader. I feel like a 300-level course with him would mean certain death.

The course blurb seemed interesting, though, and I kind of need this class.

But I wouldn't have class on Fridays.

( Read more... )

SOURCE: Me

Has the success of her new ABC comedy Cougar Town gone to Courteney Cox’s head? The 45-year-old former Friends star is winning rave reviews for her portrayal of a single mother trying to land a younger man on the ratings winning Wednesday night series, but word is Courteney is such a control freak, workers on the Cougar Town routinely try to avoid her!

“Courteney is the star of the show and very domineering. She gives off this ‘I’m important and you’re not’ vibe,” a crew member — who asked not to be identified tells The National Enquirer. “Courteney makes a huge number of script changes to make her character look good, and she is extremely picky about everything on the show,” the spy adds.

A craft services employee allegedly felt Court’s wrath after her ham and cheese sandwich making skills failed to pass muster:

“Courteney ranted at her and said, ‘Everyone knows you are supposed to have equal parts of ham and cheese in a sandwich!’”

A wardrobe worker also claims she was terrorized by the brunette after she had the brazen audacity to offer Courteney just three clothing options for a last minute scene; the star was insistent that she have at least five outfits to choose from

“Courteney got so mad and told her she would be back in 10 minutes, saying, ‘If you don’t have what I requested, you’d better not show up next time,’” says a tattle.

“Her code names are ‘Mother Hen’ or ‘Cougar Queen.’ That seems like all we hear all day. ‘Mother Hen’ needs a pick-up or ‘Cougar Queen’ is on her way to makeup. Everyone jokes that it’s Courteney’s way on the highway.”

Source

If Hollywood was hoping Danny Boyle's next film would be another jubilant, rags-to-riches fable in the vein of Slumdog Millionaire, then it has another thing coming. What it has coming, in fact, is a stark, small-scale survival drama about a lonely mountaineer who cuts off his own forearm.

Boyle has signed up to direct 127 Hours, a film based on the true-life ordeal of mountaineer Aron Ralston. According to Variety, the picture will reunite Boyle with his team on the Oscar-sweeping Slumdog Millionaire. Christian Colson returns as producer, while Simon Beaufoy is in talks to write the script.

Aron Ralston was climbing in Utah's Blue John Canyon in late April 2003 when his arm became trapped beneath a fallen boulder. Pinned against the mountainside for five days, he survived by drinking his own urine and even videotaped a goodbye message for his family. He eventually escaped by hacking off his arm with a blunt knife and a pair of pliers.

Batman Begins star Cillian Murphy is the top choice to play Aron, and the film is due to shoot early next year with a release date set for late 2010.


Danny and Cillian have done 28 Days Later and Sunshine together, I hope this happens. Thoughts?


Dr. Crane FYT:



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Paris Hilton is declaring war on her former best friends, the Kardashian sisters, for becoming more famous and earning more cash than she does.

The hotel heiress is fuming that Kim and her sibs, who got their first big break by hanging out on the Hollywood scene with Hilton, have eclipsed her in the fame and money stakes. Sources say she's hatched a plan to boost her brand by pushing a new beauty line and make herself more likable by playing down her lavish lifestyle.

A source told Page Six: "Paris is furious that Kim got her start by hanging out in Hollywood with her -- and now, the Kardashians have it all, the reality shows, the magazine covers, the big appearance fees and promotional deals.

"She used to command $100,000 for club appearances, but now Kim is the hottest girl -- and they aren't friends anymore. The magazines are bidding around $300,000 for Kourtney's baby-shower and baby pictures. And Khloe's wedding brought in record ratings for E!

"Paris has realized that standing for excess in a recession doesn't appeal," our insider continued. "The Kardashian girls seem more real, and girls identify with them more. She's got to ditch the pink Bentley and concentrate on developing herself."

Sources close to Hilton said she's carefully working on the launch of her new hair and beauty line, which she'll unveil in Beverly Hills on Tuesday, taking the lead from the Kardashians by having her family at her side.

And she's keen to play up her more stable relationship with Doug Reinhardt and talk about the possibility of marriage and babies.

The source added: "Paris has 15 product lines on sale. She isn't really a party girl anymore, she is quite settled with Doug. She wants more people to appreciate that she's grown up." A rep for Hilton declined to comment.

Source

Lindsay Lohan is trying her hand at fashion once again.

Though the star earned some bad reviews for her debut collection as artistic advisor for famed house Emanuel Ungaro, she broke the news to Access Hollywood on Thursday that she has a collection for a different label in the works.

“[Jeweler] Pascal [Mouawad] and I are actually working together, we’re doing something with a friend who owns bebe,” she told Access at Pascal’s Nu Pop Movement launch party in West Hollywood. “We’re doing a collection for them and we’re also going to be doing some other things.”

A Pascal rep told Access on Friday that the new line has yet to be finalized.

Lindsay previously told People that she’s also hard at work on the follow-up to her Ungaro debut, with the house’s next collection set to debut in January.

“I am learning,” she said at the time.

Source

Joss Whedon has become something of a tortured artist since 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' ended its highly successful seven-season run in 2003. Since Sunnydale was destroyed and 'Angel' got pulled right when it was finding its own identity post-'Buffy,' Whedon has yet to find another long-running hit. It's still hard to believe that a show as great as 'Firefly' only lasted one season!

Whedon's bad luck continues with the recent announcement that Fox is pulling the plug on 'Dollhouse,' a series that had enough of a following -- and potential -- to warrant another season. Would 'Dollhouse' have really hit its stride further down the road? We'll never know. Here are some other sci-fi television series that met their makers too soon.

( Read more... )

And what do you think? What other sci-fi shows were taken away from us too soon?