Woohoo!
I just bought a laptop!
$589 for a Dell 1405 (that's the little, lite-sized one) with 40 GB hd and 1 gig of memory! I'm so pleased.

The end.

Well, meeting the parents went well. I think. Meh.

Beth Orton was fun. There was a belligerent dude in front of us who was being borderline abusive to his girlfriend. Both were very drunk, and she was doing shit to him, too, but you could tell by the way she sat and took his angry tirade that she's experienced it before. It made me feel sad and almost blindingly angry.

So, I just finished Robin McKinley's Deerskin, and I think I'm in love. With her words. And their elliptical way of glancing, at times gently, at times fiercely, against the tale she's telling. It's a nearly brutal book, but it resonates despite its setting, and it has a depth of clarity that is at once beautiful and horrible.

Unnerving, to say the least.

She was the guest of honor at Wiscon 2005, and in her speech she gave the following bit of anecdote which I find myself agreeing with on some sort of bizarre visceral level: "I've found to my dismay that in England I still get the reaction, oh, you're a feminist? You don't look like a feminist. And we all know what that means. The temptation is to punch them in the eye and then as they stand there trying to staunch the blood, say, now do I look like a feminist? But I don't guess that would do the cause any good, so I have abstained. So far."

Thanks, Louise, for your recent post. I wrote Tammy Baldwin to thank her for voting against Bush's veto on H.R. 810. Y'all, stem-cell research is a good thing! They should slap a label across the research room doors stating "no potential babies were harmed in the quest for miraculous disease-curing medical techniques." People are stupid. Sometimes that thought terrifies me so much I want nothing more than to burrow into my bed and hide from them for the rest of my life. But that's hardly a worthwhile pursuit.

Oh yeah, and I guess I'm slated to meet my girlfriend's parents tonight. This will be a terrifying experience, I'm quite sure. After that it's a Beth Orton concert, though, so that should be pretty good.