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So I just did the easiest cut-your-own-hair trick EVER - comb the whole mess into a ponytail at the exact top of your head, pull the ponytail forward, cut a straight line across, and it comes out a decent layered look. Mine doesn't look any worse than it did before! - but it probably helps that it's long, curly, and looks best in a sort of messy mermaid style.
A gorgeous warm day today, so I went out with a trash bag and did some picking up after a winter's worth of undergrads. I got to be out of doors and the yard and walk are much prettier and nicer to be in now, so everyone wins.
I sent off a couple of conference proposals last night that I'd been fretting over for weeks - one I might likely get, the other's an incredibly far stretch but the panel topic was so close to issues I've been researching this year, I couldn't not. Am anxious about the entire thing, but also so much lighter now they're gone.
Links to other cool things around the internet:
an older xkcd, found tripping on random, but I grinned so hard over Sagan-man that I want to memorialize the moment. Carl Sagan, you will always be a superhero in my heart!
originally in Harper's, via adamantine, Quitting the Paint Factory: "trouble - the kind that might threaten the symmetry of a well-ordered garden – needs time to take root. Take away the time, therefore, and you choke off the problem before it begins. Obedience reigns, the plow stays in the furrow; things proceed as they must. Which raises an uncomfortable question: Could the Church of Work – which today has Americans aspiring to sleep deprivation the way they once aspired to a personal knowledge of God – be, at base, an anti-democratic force?"
from Vulture, Why it doesn't matter that the second season of Downton Abbey was mediocre: "On Downton, there are no sociopath mobsters you care about despite yourself, or adulterous, lying ladies' men you are attracted to, or admirable but murderous drug dealers, or increasingly psychotic and pathetic chemistry teachers, or any other sort of semi-good but maybe really bad person with deep-seated psychological issues. It is about lovely people with lovable flaws who are trying to do the best they can most of the time."
(I am not entirely sure I agree with this entirely - it papers over the issue that those lovely people are also pretty much Oppressive Overlords, in the same way the show does, and I think that pulling apart Downton's loveliness from its nascent feudalism is an important part of enjoying it. Also I liked the second series better, for all its soapiness, so there.)
A gorgeous warm day today, so I went out with a trash bag and did some picking up after a winter's worth of undergrads. I got to be out of doors and the yard and walk are much prettier and nicer to be in now, so everyone wins.
I sent off a couple of conference proposals last night that I'd been fretting over for weeks - one I might likely get, the other's an incredibly far stretch but the panel topic was so close to issues I've been researching this year, I couldn't not. Am anxious about the entire thing, but also so much lighter now they're gone.
Links to other cool things around the internet:
an older xkcd, found tripping on random, but I grinned so hard over Sagan-man that I want to memorialize the moment. Carl Sagan, you will always be a superhero in my heart!
originally in Harper's, via adamantine, Quitting the Paint Factory: "trouble - the kind that might threaten the symmetry of a well-ordered garden – needs time to take root. Take away the time, therefore, and you choke off the problem before it begins. Obedience reigns, the plow stays in the furrow; things proceed as they must. Which raises an uncomfortable question: Could the Church of Work – which today has Americans aspiring to sleep deprivation the way they once aspired to a personal knowledge of God – be, at base, an anti-democratic force?"
from Vulture, Why it doesn't matter that the second season of Downton Abbey was mediocre: "On Downton, there are no sociopath mobsters you care about despite yourself, or adulterous, lying ladies' men you are attracted to, or admirable but murderous drug dealers, or increasingly psychotic and pathetic chemistry teachers, or any other sort of semi-good but maybe really bad person with deep-seated psychological issues. It is about lovely people with lovable flaws who are trying to do the best they can most of the time."
(I am not entirely sure I agree with this entirely - it papers over the issue that those lovely people are also pretty much Oppressive Overlords, in the same way the show does, and I think that pulling apart Downton's loveliness from its nascent feudalism is an important part of enjoying it. Also I liked the second series better, for all its soapiness, so there.)