Iphigeneian Swap

I have been doing a sizable amount of adventuring lately!

Canyoning: Best fun. Rappelling over waterfalls at dusk (and into the night) with my lady love--and also Eliah, who is like a Lady Love but more of a supremely precise Physicist with Physicist hairs, and who would probably object to being called a Lady. Anyway, it was superb, and slippery, and is pretty much everything you ever wanted to do to a waterfall but were too afraid to actually follow through with (scootching down streambed on yr bum! Splashing in the splashes! Hooray!).

Then Caving! At Knox cave. I successfully chimneyed this time! I also got really nauseous. But it was really wet & cold (unusual! for Knox, because it is supposed to be a dryish cave). 'S pretty though. Went through a passage called The Football Room, so named because it is as long as a football field and as tall as a football. Went to the Well Hung Room, so named because it has a big di--I mean! Because it has lots of formations! Got up the Lemon Squeeze... Got stuck at the end of the 12 Cent Passage, so named because Eliah found a dime and two pennies at the mouth (slightly less official naming, that). Got unstuck. Also! Omguh! The Crystal Crawl which opens into The Alabaster Room! Which is gorgeous. Tah.

And also urban adventures, including but not limited to musical festivals, baseball games, fireworks & symphony shows, and a midnight run to Wegman's for Nix, because one of Leilani's students had lice and we got paranoid.

And now! Camping at Lake Umbagog(ogogogog) in upper New Hampshire with Theatre folk.
Ummmmmmbagog.
Ba. Gog.
Og.

okay, so (1) Dylan Thomas is great great great, really tops; this play sounds like Joyce on a stage and it's rife with Welsh accents, but comes with handy pronunciation/glossary--which is nice, because what're you going to do with a word like Llareggub? Apparently "a voiceless l pronounced from the side of the mouth, accent on the second syllable, the third rhyming with 'bib.'" Hm.

But! More overly over, (2)
Whoooo knew that the Decemberists "Billy Liar" (from Her Majesty album) is based on this play! Because I certainly did not and I was suspicious the minute I saw Nogood Boyo was a character but then! Oh, but then: Boyo catches a whalebone corset. It is all he has caught all day. And, well, hot damn.

[All a-drifting, he's a no-good boyo/ Sent a-fishing for a whalebone corset frame/ His only catch all day]

And so obviously when he gets decked by a Japanese geisha with a garland of pearls, it's Mrs. Dai Bread Two in her kimono. Huh.

Neat!
But, newly clarified Decemberists lyrics aside, I highly recommend Under Milk Wood. There's a lot going on. Jaclyn recommended & loaned it to me, saying she wrote a paper on it that she loved, (comparing with Myth of Sisyphus and Waiting for Godot, which sounds pretty awesome in its own right) and it is definitely a text that wants to be broken down and picked apart. Annnd maybe I will.

We are planning a vacation!
We are going to Toronto for their Pride Festival! Pride! Vacation! Gaaaaaaay!



Gaaaay! In Canada! Hooray!
(so excited!)
(also we are going to run a 5k but that is not as fagtastic, though it is pretty wicked awesome)


Vacatiooooooon!
It's totally the summer, you guys.

I suddenly like her? She came on in Lunchie's car the other day and I found out that I wanted to maybe hear nothing else for about 4 days.

I love "inflammatory writ" so much!
(I realize I am about 4 years late to hop on this train. It will not stop me from playing it as I zoom around in my rental car!)

Adventuretiiiiiime!

So, per Jamie's interest, and because I'm still pretty giddy from it--I give you: Vertical Caving! A True Story!

Sooooo we went to two caves, the first of which is called Ella Armstrong. This is a wee baby cave, and pretty much a straight shot, but it is my first! And very pretty. The entrance is reallyreallybloody tight, and getting out involved some degree of tricky chimneying and sideways wiggles. But, once we were in, Jaclyn said "Look up!" and I did and my light hit the walls and she said "It looks like stars!" and it did! Eliah said they are salt/calcium deposits but they sparkle like ten thousand sparkling things. So, we rappeled down about 25 feet (it's a baby cave) and unhooked. There's one main passage that's big, that ends with a tiny crawlspace passage that you have to wriggle through, and it just gets narrower and narrower until your hips don't fit anymore and you can't lift your nose out of the water, and then there's a side passage that starts out wide and tall but becomes a crawling slithery wedge that eventually doubles back and widens again. There was also! A passage through a hole in the wall halfway up the rappel! Pretty.

Then! Then we went to the Big Ol' Cave (Benson's). Which was a marvelous extent of miles of underground with loads of passages, with completely different formations and walls and this one had underground river/waterfalls, which we climbed, up and down. We didn't wear wetsuits at Ella Armstrong, but we did at Benson's, as was mostly water and would have been goddamn freezing without that layer. That one had a 60 feet drop at the entrance (which, btdubs, was little more than a small pit in the middle of the forest. How did anyone find it?! More importantly, how did they find without tripping into it and falling 60 feet?! Goddamn!) which is reeeeeally fun to rappel, but significantly less fun to climb up 7 hours later when you are totally exhausted. Still neat though.) where we got to say "O Hai bigassspiders. Don't mind me." and then we left our vert gear at the entrance so we could do all kinds of wiggling. Benson's is a goddamn maze--if Eliah hadn't been dozens of times, we'd have been so incredibly lost. There were bits where I was straddling a crack in the rock--there were bits where I was under the rock--there were bits where I was totally covered in mud. Those were fun bits. There was! a few low airspace sections where I was crawling (um, maybe scooting is a better description. It was a very small space) through very cold water and the available air between water and stone over me was about 3 inches.

Generally, lots of army crawling was in order.

It's interesting to see just how small of a space you can fit your body. And to see how to move around in that space. If you can move around in that space. I think I used muscles that I've never used before, because how often are you belly rolling over riverstones? Not that often, I think.

We also played a game called "turn off all the headlamps and see TOTAL DARKNESS." in which my eyes struggled to find something--anything--to focus on, but ultimately failed. ...AWESOME. Dark.

In terms of Descent beasties, I did not see any. I actually did not see any life forms, except for one tiny albino shrimpbeastie in Ella Armstrong. Oh! I take it back--we saw bacteria clusters in Benson's. Cute. It was, actually, incredibly unthinkable that anything possibly could live down there. It was necessarily barren.

I liked it. I think I'll do it again.

I have been so pleased by the last two days! We walked downtown and admired all the bits and pieces of the city. Trees growing through chainlink, cool pipes on the sides of houses, green green green all around, and then today was the Taste and it was so yummy--

and we played darts.



Tomorrow, I rapel into a cave.
Monday...maybe tennis. Or maybe waterfalls. Either one.

It is almost like I am interesting.

I get to wear a wetsuit!
I hope that a ravenous pack of beasties does not munch me and all my besties, a la The Descent. But there was no poofy-haired physicist boy leading the trip in that movie, so I think the beasties will probably leave us alone.




Mrrrrrr I like my job but I also like sleeping.

This house has a record player!
Sleater-Kinney, I will play you on a crackling vinyl so loud and so hard! And maybe, just maybe, I will dance and strut and bound Oh Ohhhhhhh!




I'm a bubble in a sound wave
A sonic push for energy
Exploding like the sun
A flash of clean light hope
All you scientists can hold your breath
Can I decide to show myself, oh oh

Oh oh oh...
(Take me to the source of chaos let me be the butterfly
oh my, imperfect symmetry has underlying poetry in rhyme)

If you think like Thomas Edison
Could you invent a world for me
Now all that's on the surface
Are bloody arms and oil fields
Could I turn this place all upside down
And shake you and your fossils out, oh oh

Oh oh oh...
(You can't predict everything with Newton like certainty, why
Oh my, cause it floats around all we see with oscillating energy on high)

And you soothe yourself with the sounds you know
You tune out out out the hypnotic drone
Perfect hexagon of the honeycomb
And you soothe your soul with the shapes you know

Should I come outside and run your cars
Should I run your rockets to the stars
Could you invent a world for me
I need to hear a symphony
If I'm to run the future
You've got to let the old world go, oh oh

Oh oh oh...
(Take me to the source of chaos let me be the butterfly
oh my, imperfect symmetry has underlying poetry in rhyme)

And you soothe yourself with the sounds you know
You tune out out out the hypnotic drone
Perfect hexagon of the honeycomb
And you soothe your soul with the shapes you know

Your word for me is fusion
But is real change an illusion
Could I turn this place all upside down
And shake you and your fossils out

If I'm to run the future
You've got to let the old world go
Could you invent a world for me
I need to hear a symphony, oh oh

Oh oh oh...
(You can't predict everything with Newton like certainty, why
Oh my, cause it floats around all we see with oscillating energy on high)

I feel incredibly drained.

Staying in 'Cuse a few extra days for Abbey's graduation. This means:

1) We went to the Jello Museum yesterday in LeRoy, NY.

2) Going to see VP JOE BIDEN tomorrow, as he is the commencement speaker--he is a Syracuse Law School Graduate, after all!

3) I am really really going to miss Abbey. Who will be our Bea Arthur? Who will we call when we want to go on a Wegman's mission at 3 am? Who will splooge over Ben Folds! Who will go on a car battery extravaganza?! Who will say fuck all the time!!!! I am probably going to cry like a pussy bitch. Abbey will probably tell me to "fucking stop that shit." Oh, Abbey. I can't wait for you to be my kids' High School English Teacher.

In other news, an A in Latin! an A! in Latin! I rock ass! an A in Latiiiiiiinnnnnnn! Yeah!

On the bright side, I processed over 100 Nazi stamps today!

60 of them had Adolf Hitler's face, the rest were flying swastikas rocking out on jet planes.

Not quite as rad as the $250,000 dollars worth of stamp that I handled yesterday. But significantly more 3rd Reich-y. For some reason, there are 9 different fonts used on a brick of these stamps? Something about they stole the typeset from an occupied newspaper?

We also got to solve mystery postmarks and use our resources to fill in blurry/missing letters to determine whether or not the mark was a forgery!

Basically what I'm telling you is my job is a film noir detective movie.
With stamps.

NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

...I really don't want to!

What if essays were submitted via twitter? In 140 characters or less?

IphigeneianSwap @ProfCecil Evil in South African Lit pretty much like Evil everywhere else: Bad. If schizophrenic, per Bessie Head, Evil=FUCKING TERRIFYING.

IphigeneianSwap @ProfErinSkye Restoration dudes still doing the Oedipal thing. Aphra Behn exhibiting male agency? Anxieties of allupons.

IphigeneianSwap @MahatmaMoody Yeah, you're not getting that paper until May.

I was a trainwreck. Chugga chugga etc.




To Do:
-Most things.
-Get a house.
-Mail that thing.
-Get that stuff.
-Not make people angry.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Better Know a District - New York's 25th - Dan Maffei
comedycentral.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest

-2 Page Proposal for 10 Page Paper on Masculinity in Oroonoko vs Rochester's Poems, centering on Theories of Gendered Literary Canons and Authority Perceptions as Delineated by Harold Bloom/Gilbert & Gubar.

-5 Page Paper on A Comparison of a character/event/item in Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur with its reappearance in a more recent telling. In this case, the entrapment of Merlin by Nyneve/Viviane in Buchanan's poem Merlin's Tomb.

-3 Page write-up of Presentation I gave last week on Fuck-All Themes in Coetzee's novel Disgrace.

-Maid of Honor Speech for my sister's wedding.

Too bad I refuse to do actual work, and instead spent my time eating pork chops and seeing impromptu 3D movies (Monsters vs Aliens... it's pretty funny, you guys), and then Roji's and crosswords and, well, pretty much everything but work.


Also, in case you were wondering if I have 3 papers due on April 28th, I do. 26 pages worth of papers. If I were clever, I'd start working on those now, you see?

At least while I am temporarily gimpy, I can count on my loving, sympathetic lady to serenade me with such ballads as "Pretty Woman (Crutchin' Down the Street)" "Crutches in a Dangerous Time" and "If you Wanna Be My Crutches."


Romance.



Also, here is a little gift for everyone, brought to you by Nilus Klingle.

So, Mr. Joel visited for one hell of a weekend.

No! Absolutely Not! went well both nights, Joel developed a mad crush on our star (as you do, Morgan is pretty goddamn adorable) and audiences seemed to really enjoy it. We taped it, hopefully to be uploaded to YouTube some day, for all the fans slightly less devoted than Joel.

We did a cast party on opening night, with great results. Overly complex games of dominos and guitar jamming were enjoyed by all. Very relaxed atmosphere--I love parties chez Morgan/Ian/Alex.

Saturday day we enjoyed the nice weather that came out to deceive Joel and walked around the downtown. Took Joel to Sound Garden, only to stumble upon RaRaRiot, giving a free in-store mini concert before their show at the Westcott that evening! Rather fortuitous. There was also chocolate and Dinosaur BBQ and generally sunshine, which was a nice change.

and then Saturday night... oy. Well, Joel just got drunk enough to be magnificently faggy, but Lei was sick to the point where I was seriously concerned, ended up calling DPS/EMT-types. After a major hangover, she recovered, but I am still suffering from the effects of "really dumb, should not have been on trampoline after drinking several glasses of wine." By which I mean, totally fuckin' sprained my ankle. But! not broken, no apparent torn ligaments, and I am the fastest crutcher in the west. Just. Really damn purple.

The best part of this, however, is that Health Services was closed on Sunday, so I not only hobbled around sans crutches, but also when we went to take Joel to the airport in the pounding rain, there was a time where he was literally carrying me in his arms, squinting into the rain, wind blowing his hair back. Very inspiring.

So.
My ankle...
Not so much, hmm?