Sharon's Personal Planet

School's back! I really do feel cheated out of my hols, considering that I had class 4 days a week for the evil effin' mcat for most of the four months. However, there's nothing to do now, but buckle down and get back to the grind. As usual, it's my elective course (Intro to Roman Culture) that seems the most interesting - we opened with an anecdote wherein Seneca the younger extols the braveness of a German captive who, rather than face his death in the amphitheatre, killed himself by choking on a sponge used in public lavatories to wipe one's rear. Our professor noted that ancient sources often take a lot of stuff for granted, thereby leaving important questions unanswered, such as - "Was the sponge clean or not?"

Everyone's had blog entries commemorating the end of summer, and so I feel I ought to follow suite - but I did ABSOLUTELY nothing this summer, so sorry, y'all get NOTHING. I became more geeky, read voraciously, slept muchly, and ate even more. Thus ends the story of the summer of '04.

I should REALLY learn not to get into a manga before it's concluded. The latest one is Naoki Urasawa's 20th Century Boys, which has a bit of an X-files/conspiracy theory vibe that I loved. However, don't rush off to MangaScreener to download it just yet, since the series isn't completed in Japan, and volume 17 won't even be released there till October 30th! *argh* So here I am, reading and REreading volumes 1-16 to the point of memorization. The premise of the series is intriguing - in the 70's a group of friends devised a plan whereby they would defeat bad guys; twenty years later, they notice that someone IS trying to take over the world using the plan they thought the bad guys would use in their childhood. No one is what they seem, no one stays dead for long, and nothing can be taken for granted; sound interesting yet?

Oh, and on Inuyasha - Kagura died. It was very sniffle-inducing, while that whole arc lasted. :(

I tried my hand in the kitchen tonight, and managed to make a presentable Dal!!! And I managed to fry fish (shush, Hem!) Unfortunately, my family is less appreciative of my culinary endeavours than they might be:

Me: Don't feel shy about congratulating me on my latest culinary success!!!

Family: The rice is crunchy.

Me: There's something wrong with that?

Family: O.O

Me: huh?

Family: Maybe we dropped her on the head once too often when she was a kid.

Me: sorry, I didn't catch that?

Family: so, who wants take-out?

I was re-reading Helene Hanff's 84 Charing Cross Road. Technically, she's not really the author, rather a coauthor and editor. It's a collection of the correspondence between her and a a London bookstore, Marks and Co., which was at 84 Charing Cross Road, London. It's a fascinating read, really - the letters start in 1949 and continue until 1969, when Frank Doel, her chief correspondent at the store passed away. Hanff was a screenwriter, an New Yorker, and an anglophile (a trait i seem to share) and she liked old english books, preferably used. It's interesting to see the tone of the letters change from businesslike to friendly, and the world they describe is oddly remote, for all that it was only half a century ago. The writing is wonderful too; I'd like nothing better than to be able to express myself with that sort of charm and wit. Letter-writing is a lost art though; we are incapable of expressing ourselves without scads of smileys and acronyms.

think i've said all i wanted to say this time; apologies for the delay - writer's block is not limited to authors who actually possess writing talent. :D ta!