I know it just won a Golden Globe and all

...but I still refuse to see "Dances With Smurfs."
Okay, maybe it's technically brilliant and I gather it's so flipping beautiful that it depresses people to see our own world or whatever (seriously - CNN said so), but my fucking FSM I NEED A PLOT IN MY FILMS. OR AT LEAST PLAUSIBLE CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. Honestly, Up in the Air was excellent, and The Hurt Locker should have won for director (which in the interest of staying honest I will admit here to having not seen yet - I've been waiting for dvd and Netflix so that I can watch it with whatever breaks I need to take to be able to deal with it). At least Glee won, so I can deal with that. And Robert Downey Jr's speech was perfect.

In reality: classes start tomorrow. I managed to do better than I have some semesters in dealing with this problem. My syllabus is already photocopied, even - two years ago I managed to photocopy my syllabus five minutes before class began. I'd have been fucked proper if the copy machine hadn't been working. So this semester the syllabus is done (finished mostly last night around 1am - such a fantastically fail way to spend a Saturday night), I've got everything that I could find online up on Blackboard already and a list of the last few articles/books I need to request from the library ready to go on my laptop for some point in the next day or two when I feel like bothering the folks at the ILL desk. My nails are polished in a fairly non-professional yet course appropriate black-with-red-shimmer and I know exactly what BPAL I'm wearing tomorrow but am still stumped on actual clothing (aka, the only part of my appearance other than my hair that my students are likely to notice in the slightest). Story of my life - the details are all put together but I'm missing a few of the major pieces.

As far as it being the start of my last semester of grad school, I keep thinking I should have some deep or profound thoughts about it, but I don't. I don't even really have a "yippee" type feeling about it. I just want it to end. I'm hoping the class goes well (it generally does - this is my third go-round with the syllabus), but beyond that I just want it over and I want to move on with my life.

I started reading some of the novel last night because I felt like working on it but wasn't being particularly productive in the writing sense of things. And. It's not awful. I wasn't embarassed for myself when I read it. So that's a bonus, because embarassment was pretty much what I was expecting to feel. What I read needs fucktons of work before I'd show it to anyone else (at which point it would need fucktons more work, I'm sure, because that's how these things go), but at least for the moment I'm not feeling bad about it (definite bonus, as I've got this irritating won't-go-away guilt about working on novel stuff when I "should" be working on my dissertation... it maybe time to return to old attempts to rid myself of "should," as "should" never leads to good feelings).

A propos of nothing, I made an apricot-pine nut tart from a Lidia Bastianich recipe, and it was AWESOME. I'll post the pictures and stuff when I figure out how to post pictures here (read: when I bother uploading them from my camera).

I'll just end it here by reiterating that I'm surprised that I'm greeting my last semester of grad school so... blandly. I'm much calmer than I would have thought I'd be.

Also good for calm: The Flaming Lips' "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots."