I hunt for haddock's eyes among the heather bright

[freckles_and_doubt]

The upsy-downsy continues. Annoying day, score as follows:

• Number of post offices visited: 4
• Number of post offices declining to offer service I need: 4
• Number of extra miles walked to circumnavigate building operations in Claremont: approximately 5 millyun.
• New handbags bought: 1
• New Pratchetts bought: 1 (officially a consolation for the failure of job offer)
• Henna sachets applied to hair: 4
• Number of pages completed in new tax returns: 2 (which is all of them. The new tax returns are ridiculously simple and possibly represent a fiendish ploy on the part of the government to attract high-earning immigrants).
• Number of frantic phone calls fielded from third-year students suffering hand-in angst: 3
• Number of honours dissertations marked: 0
• Sinus headaches endured: 1, but the bastard has been going all day.
• Number of grains of rice donated on Free Rice: 950. The opinions of institutions of higher learning in this peninsula notwithstanding, my score wibbles around between 48 and 50. I feel smug. Also, more vocabulary-rich.

While on the subject of irritation, I have to have a little rant here. Indulge me. Typing "Stephanie Meyer" into Google will produce any number of pages on which bookstores, reviewers and readers rave in maddened approbation of her recent young adult vampire fantasy series, which starts with Twilight. The friend who lent me the first two books likewise makes approving noises. I spent the weekend reading aforementioned novels. In my fairly unhumble opinion, they're dreadful. The reviewers throw around words like "exquisite", but I find the writing style flat, dead and weighed down with extraneous detail. The plot is hackneyed, a sort of teen vampire school romance thing; the vampires themselves have moments of interest, but are basically a concatenation of clichés - graceful, deadly, sexy, tormented. The human characters aren't. Human, that is: they're cardboard. The basic idea has some possibilities, which led me to madly read through both books in the desperate hope she might, at some point, actually do justice to the idea, but I can't see it.

What am I missing? Am I that embittered an old academic? I had to go and re-read McKinley's Sunshine just to get the taste out of my mouth, which had its inevitable effect of giving me a serious baking yen, so the jo&stv got malva pudding on Sunday night. Which reminds me, the remnants are still in the 'fridge. If I go and eat them now, I can feed an anti-inflammatory to Sid the Sinus Headache, which may shut him up for a while. Plan.

Last Night I Dreamed: a crumbling country estate at which I was staying, in an outside room with a door which wouldn't close properly. I was amazed to discover that an ex-fling of mine was doing woodwork for a weird experimental movie with Elijah Wood: unfortunately the strange experimental format (lots of writing on bits of wood assembled into three-dimensional constructions) meant that the film was abandoned before it was finished. (I briefly met Elijah Wood - he had a really limp handshake). Travelling away from the estate, it became apparent that someone or something had been going through the countryside killing people, including the owner of another estate, who had become a giant ghost jellyfish. Then the director of the weird experimental movie suddenly wanted me to take part in another film, in which I had to wear a long red dress.

I solemnly swear I am not on drugs.

Comments

[wolverine-nun.livejournal.com]

I agree he looks nice. And the mention of submarines is pretty tantalising. Get bumpy or wythchfynder or another of our militarily knowledgeable friends to feed you some submarine info and dazzle him with your insight.

[schedule5.livejournal.com]

I reckon bumpy should vet the guys lj page. It's in some angular language....

Aaand... nice theme :)