Out Of Office Message

I'm on my way to Brighton today for the first Brighton Burlesque festival. In my absence, please enjoy this clip of Bendy Dick Cumberbatch doing impressions of other Hollywood actors in this interview for his movie The Imitation Game, which I will be reviewing when I get back from my trip.

Triumphant Return

Oh hello there internets. I apologize for abandoning you and assure you it was, in fact, temporary. As I mentioned in August, I didn't have much time to blog whilst writing my dissertation. I finished that, ten days before it was actually due no less, in order that I would not have to work on it/worry about it while I was back in America for my brother's wedding - having to wear a dress and and sandals gave me more than enough to worry about on that front. We got back a month ago, so by all rights, I should have resumed blogging, but there is no way for me to describe to you the amount of not wanting to be anywhere NEAR my laptop post-dissertation and so I stuck it in a corner, disappeared from Facebook and Twitter and failed to blog for the entirety of October despite not actually being too busy for any of those things all month long.

But now it's November! And November is NaBloPoMo, and I love the challenge of NaBloPoMo, so today and then for 29 more days in a row there will be something here to read. I don't promise there will be anything GOOD to read, but I will endeavor to do my best.

For those who are interested, the final title of my dissertation was The Mainstreaming of BDSM?: Examining mainstream acceptance of BDSM culture through Fifty Shades of Grey and Secretary and it will be a surprise to precisely NO ONE that what I concluded is E.L. James is a first class asshole who understands BDSM about as well as an eel understands tap dancing. Of course I explained it it much greater detail and in the "clear, precise academic language" I was specifically instructed to use, meaning I tried not to be be funny and liberally sprinkled it with words like "engendered"and "heteronormative", which StereoNinja thought was hilarious. As far as I know it hasn't been marked yet.

Ok, then. Let the NaBloPoMoing begin!

Not Dead (I Think)

With my dissertation coming due in less than a month now and me typically far behind my own personal (and to be fair, probably overly ambitious) schedule, it's going to be a while before I can get back to doing some quality posts. Which is unfortunate because I have some interesting and terrifying boat stories (they are not necessarily the same stories) due to the fact that StereoNinja has bought a boat. It is StereoNinja's boat and decidedly not mine, as evidenced by the fact that he won't let me buy the new Borg cube glowing refrigerator on thinkgeek for it despite both its awesomeness and the 12V adapter it comes with which is exactly what you need for a boat based refrigerator meaning it was obviously MEANT TO BE. But it will have to wait, as I am currently deeply immersed in trying to stay on the actual topic of my paper and not wander off on tangents about how shitty E.L. James is at all the things that are NOT kink related. But you guys. It will all be over SO SOON. I just have to get through the next month.

50 Shades Absurd

After a long absence, the penultimate review of Fifty Shades Freed, read by me so you don't have to.

Here's what this book is doing to me: in the three chapters that I read for this review, a husband threatens to rape his wife but the only part I got upset about was that E.L. James has no fucking idea how banking works. I'm a monster.

When we last saw our heroine asshole, she was (dramatically at the end of a chapter) staring at a completely benign and innocuous but for its originator text message on a phone belonging to her husband that she "accidentally" turned on. Chapter 21 begins with her reacting with the kind of despair normally reserved for finding out your house burned to the ground with your whole family inside. She curls up in a fetal position and sobs while rocking back and forth. James actually writes "I rock to and fro" as if that's something people say. Her husband freaked out about a pregnancy neither of them wanted which was caused by her own awe-inspiring irresponsibility, and ran to a woman who was a very important and influential figure in his life for practically his entire life, and everything is ruined now forever. There is only one thing to do and that thing is to attempt to deliberately upset herself even further by going through ALL of Christian's text messages and emails. She is relieved to find nothing else from "the Bitch Troll" (actually capitalized! Like a fun title!) and apropos of nothing, none from Leila either. What she does find is an email terrible plot device from someone who can't write a fucking story from an investigator about the comings and goings of one Jack Hyde, attempted rapist and failed murderer extraordinaire. There is absolutely no point to this email being where it is. She reads it and immediately goes back to speculating on WHAT IT ALL MEANS and how horrible everything is now that her panicked husband did a shitty but completely understandable thing and goes to sleep in another room because LOLZ HE'LL WAKE UP AND BE SO SCARED I'M NOT RIGHT WHERE HE LEFT ME SRSLY I AM SO MATURE HAHAHAHAHAHA.

She's right though. When she emerges the next day, she finds that the entire staff has been combing the desert looking for her, though no one thought it would be a good idea to check the sex room. You know, the one with a bed in it that would be a totally likely place for someone who didn't appear on the security footage as leaving the house to likely be sleeping in. She ignores Christian's repeated attempts to have a mature and rational conversation about the pregnancy while she gets dressed for work. With extra sexy dressing activities because, you know, that's the kind of thing you take great pains to do when you're so angry at your husband you're thinking of leaving him. In the middle of this, she tells him about the text message she found and accuses him of "spinelessly" running off to fuck Elena, confirms his greatest fear by telling him she DOES choose the baby over him, and then goes mega pot/kettle on his ass by claiming that he, HE!, is the one behaving like a "petulant adolescent". Christian's attempt to solve this problem is by being all "You bring up an interesting point, let's fuck about it and see what happens" and Ana for once turns him down. No problem, says Christian, I'll just rape you then. Of course he didn't literally say "How 'bout I rape you instead?" The ACTUAL FOR REAL exchange, and it is clear from Ana's inner monologue that the reader is supposed to be SUPER FUCKING TURNED ON by it, is this:

"Don't even think about it, Grey."
"You're my wife."
"...if you touch me I will scream the place down."
"You'd scream?"
"Bloody murder."
"No one would hear you."

You guys. "You're my wife"? That hasn't been a legal excuse for rape in decades, and hasn't been a legitimate one since, um, EVER. But no matter, "No one would hear you." NO ONE WOULD HEAR YOU. Because when I want to rape my wife, Imma fucking rape the shit out of my wife, man! Ain't no stopping THIS rape train! LET'S DO THIS. I'm not saying I had even one shred of respect for E.L. James as either a writer or a woman before this, but I felt like maybe I should get some respect for her just so I could lose it again because she wrote, in a book, that people were meant to read, that rape. Is. Sexy. I hate everything.

Anyway, he nobly backs down and decides not to rape her after all. She goes to work and comes home and goes to bed before Christian and he's already gone when she wakes up the next day. She doesn't hear from him until she gets a terse email at work telling her he's flying to Portland for work. It's while she's over reacting to this that she takes a call she thinks is from Mia. But it's not Mia. It turns out to be Jack Hyde. Calling from Mia's phone. How odd! Gee, now that I think about it, Jack calling her from Mia's phone seems kind of ominous. Should we go to the next paragraph? Of course not! There is no next paragraph! It's merely the end of the chapter!

Ugh.

Anyway, Chapter 22. Jack has kidnapped Mia and if Ana doesn't bring him $5 million in the next two hours he's gonna kill Mia and maybe rape her first for good measure. And of course, she shouldn't call the cops or her security guards or anything because he'll totally know. Which is kind of a pointless instruction because these people NEVER call the police, so why would she start now? But whatever. The scary man wants the arbitrary value of $5 million, she's gonna give him $5 million. She leaves work and goes back to the house to get the checkbooks (plural) and conveniently discovers that Mr. Guns Are Bad still has an unlocked and fully loaded pistol just sitting there in the desk drawer. Mrs. Guns Are Great If You Know How To Use Them Safely does the safe thing and shoves it down the back of her pants, presumably with the safety off. I hope she shoots her own ass off. She then sneaks out of the house to go to the bank with security hot on her heels but as always one step behind.

Okay. So I used to work at the investment arm of a bank. And before that I worked in investments for years and had to deal with banks. And before THAT I've had a checking account since I was a teenager and have been to an actual bank. Let's just say I'm familiar with how going to the bank works. E.L. James clearly is not. Here's what happens. Ana gets to "the bank". I have no idea if this is a branch bank or the main bank building for this particular bank because she never says, but let's give her the benefit of the doubt that this is the main bank. She walks in and asks to withdraw $5 million. The manager, correctly, tells her that you generally need to give notice to withdraw that much money, but incorrectly follows up with, "Fortunately, however, we hold the cash reserve for the entire Pacific Northwest". No. No you absolutely do not. Because that isn't how fractional reserve banking works. Even if you are the main branch of this particular bank which for some reason keeps their entire cash reserve in one building, you do not hold the cash reserves for every commercial bank in the pacific northwest because you are not the central bank and that is not how banking works and it doesn't work that way because to do so would be colossally, unfathomably stupid. But James is just warming up. He next asks her for ID and she gives him her driver's license which still says "Anastasia Steele" on it. Her name on the account, of course, is "Anastasia Grey". But this also is not a problem because, hey here's my Amex card with my new name on it! And the bank manager is like, "Oh, cool that totally works. You said $5 million right?" THIS IS ALSO NOT HOW A BANK WORKS. If I walked into a bank with the wrong name on my ID and tried to withdraw even 500 dollars from my account they would not give it to me. You are asking them to hand over $5 million.And a piece of plastic that has a name stamped on it, but no picture of your fucking face is not a legitimate, legally acceptable form of "ID". IT'S JUST A CREDIT CARD. If the store you're shopping at is doing what they should be doing, they will be asking you for an actual ID when you try to buy something with that card, and if your name doesn't match they will not let you buy the thing. And that is a store. This is a bank. The bank is not going to hand you $5 million on the strength of your name being on a credit card, especially if you've already established that the name on the card is different from the one on your ID. But not this bank, this bank is all "Totes!" The bank manager tells her she'll have to write a check to cash and given all the other more egregious problems here, I should probably skip over the part where withdrawing $5 million from a checking account requires more paperwork than that and said paperwork would include a withdrawal slip or similar which would negate the need to write out a check, but I'm not going to because also, it is not normal to keep $5 million in a checking account in the first place. There are better and safer account types to keep that kind of money in while still remaining relatively liquid and therefore writing a check to cash in this situation is not a likely story. OH BUT IT GETS EVEN BETTER. The bank manager has at least enough sense to call Christian and ask him what the fuck is going on. I'm going to let slide the "you can't authorize transactions of that magnitude over the phone" because the bank manager called him and not the other way around, but, eh, probably this wouldn't happen at a real bank either. It turns out I was right about not keeping $5 million in a checking account because Christian authorizes him to liquidate $5 million worth of assets to cover Ana's withdrawal request. No mention of what particular assets he wants to liquidate. I'm curious because different types of securities have different levels of liquidity. Without getting too shop talky, the time between placing an order to have your assets liquidated and the amount of time it takes to process that request, sell the securities, and hand you the cash can take as much as three days depending on what you want to sell. Even if it's a more liquid security than that, the lag time from order to cash in hand on $5 million worth of transactions is going to be longer than the approximately five minutes this transaction seemed to take. Sorry but THAT IS NOT HOW A BANK WORKS. AND HAVE I MENTIONED THAT ALL OF THIS HAS BEEN GOING ON WHILE SHE HAD A LOADED GUN SHOVED DOWN THE BACK OF HER FUCKING PANTS? IN A GODDAMN BANK? Anyway, while all this shady bullshit at the First National Bank of Ludicrously Unlikely Transactions is going on, the bank manager hands the phone to Ana to talk to Christian who is understandably confused and wants to know what's going on. This would have been the perfect opportunity to mention that Jack Hyde has his sister and maybe he should use his magical problem solving skills to find her and helicopter her the hell out of there or something, but Jack said not to tell him, so instead she decides the best thing to do is upset him by telling him she needs the money because she's leaving him. Not "I'll tell you later" or "It's a surprise" or even "Just trust me on this ok?" No. The only answer she can think of to give him is "Fuck off, asshole, I'm taking your money and your baby and I hate your fucking guts." Afterwards Jack calls her back with instructions to take the money outside to his waiting van, get in it, and throw away her cell before she gets in. The bank has two courier guys carry the money out for her in several bags, saving me the trouble of complaining about how a girl that hasn't eaten in months and weighs about the same as a broomstick carried 110 pounds worth of cash all by herself and also the volume of that much cash totes fit in one sack, but I do suspect that this was for story telling purposes and not necessarily because James realized lack of strength would prevent the first thing and physics the second.

Ana dutifully throws a cell phone in the trash and gets in the van which is being driven by Elizabeth from work, because, apparently, Jack has some "dirt" on her. They drive to Jack's remote location and when they get there, Jack starts beating the crap out of her. He pushes her to the ground where she hits her head hard enough to pass out...but not before she can pull out her gun and shoot him in his kneecap! Hooray! And also not before...yes...you know it....Christian comes running up out of nowhere LIKE A MIRACULOUS PHANTOM to dramatically hold her while she loses consciousness! Wait, wasn't he in Portland? How did he get there in the, like, 15 minutes since he was just on the phone with her? It DOESN'T MATTER, you guys. ROMANCE.

I really thought the banking thing was going to be the low point of this writing. I was immediately wrong. Chapter 23 features literally THE WORST and most contrived plot device I have ever read in a published volume. Ana is in the hospital. She is in the hospital because she has a skull fracture, "a major contusion to the head", and I imagine probably a concussion because generally you do not hit your head heard enough to be (mostly) unconscious for DAYS and NOT have a concussion. But how does one advance a plot when the first person narrator is unconscious for two entire days? Well, you do that by having her just barely wake up for a few seconds at a time JUST IN TIME to hear bits of conversations people are bizarrely having in the room with her that all coincidentally happen to advance the plot. And of course if she's unconscious for two whole days, you do this EIGHT TIMES. IN A ROW. And NOT ONLY do you advance the plot through convenient windows of consciousness EIGHT TIMES IN A ROW, but you also close EVERY ONE of those vignettes with a vomit inducing overly dramatic return to unconsciousness :

1."...unconsciousness claims me once more, stealing me away from the pain."
2."The fog closes in."
3."I fight the fog...fight...But I spiral down once more into oblivion. No..."
4."The fog surrounds me once more and I'm dragged down...down. No!"
5."The world dips and blurs and I'm gone."
6."Oh...the darkness closes in. No-"
7."Sweet oblivion beckons."
8."I try. I try. I want to see him. But my body disobeys me, and I fall asleep once more."

I can't even process this. Just, why? WHY would you write this this way? You couldn't have just had people TELL HER ALL THESE THINGS WHEN SHE WOKE UP? And the seemingly random italics...how did you decided which words out of these mini shit parades should be in italics? When I do it, it's for emphasis. When you do it...I don't know, I just can't tell. By the way, in my head I do all these noes in Luke Skywalker's voice when he finds out Darth Vader is his father. It's the only way I can go on.

Anycunt, what we find out in this awful, AWFUL, expositional stunt is that Christian really does want the baby, Mia is recovering from being roofied but is otherwise fine, Elizabeth is telling the police everything, everyone thinks Ana is practically the goddamn Batman, and Christian's mom thinks he should say sorry to Ana when she wakes up for being a total piece of shit. The fact that this plot device was not necessary to advance the story is proved when Christian tells her even more things when she finally does wake up, like that Jack and Elizabeth have been arrested and how they figured out where she was (the cell phone she threw out was the bank manager's; she had cleverly hidden hers inside the bags of money so the people who she hadn't told she was in trouble could track it if they figured it out on their own which of course they did.) Since Christian has decided he wants the baby (that neither one of them wanted three days ago) all the stuff about Elena is forgiven without ever really being explained, and the rest of the chapter is just gross things James thinks are romantic, like Christian not letting her pee without him standing there and forcing food on her that directly contradicted her doctor's orders, you know, typical abusive dick moves, swoon swoon. The chapter ends with more typical Christian self-flagellation about how he'll be a terrible father because he's a total piece of shit (though in his defense, he's right) and a nauseating conversation about whether they should name their child "Junior" or "Blip". Personally I would name it "Get adopted by mature responsible people who are way more suitable to be parents than we are" but god forbid anything logical or healthy happen in this entire fucking trilogy.

-----

So anyway, sorry I made you wait seven or eight months for that. There's really only one more left of the actual book, and then I understand there are something like three different epilogues to the story which will probably get covered as a bonus post. Those should come with much shorter breaks in between as I am now using "getting to blog" as an incentive to write my actual dissertation. On that front, I am not going to lie, I am finding it massively difficult to write about the BDSM/romance aspects of the books without making snide comments about how everything else about these people is also stupid. Because seriously, everything in these is so fucking stupid.

MAJOR NEWS!

GUESS WHAT EVERYBODY. I am about to post the long awaited second (or maybe third) to last Fifty Shades Freed review. I know you probably think I forgot about it or gave up, but I didn't, I just had a combination depression/school is hard and takes up a lot of time/everything in my whole life changed at the same time and I freaked out/ wait, where did all my money go so fast? thing going on, and I could barely face blogging AT ALL, let alone writing exceptionally long blog posts about something that I genuinely hate reading and/or thinking about. But I finally got around to writing the review for the chapters I read last November and it's going up in about five minutes, with all the typos and grammatical errors still in it that I will fix after it's posted because for some reason I can see my errors better on the blog itself than I can in compose mode. I don't know, it's a thing. So, yeah. Posting that now. Thought I should warn you. Tell your friends that have given up on me to please come back.

Amberance Goes To [REDACTED]

About a week ago, I was doing this temp job for a few days which turned out to be the single most blogable thing that has happened to me since I've been here. And annoyingly I can't really tell you anything about it, because I had to sign a social media non-disclosure agreement that said I wouldn't tell you where I was and I wouldn't tell you who else was there (this was a pointless concern, since if someone important/famous had been there, I almost certainly wouldn't have recognized them because knowing who people are is not my strong suit (witness my once asking my brother "What is a Kardashian?"), so I couldn't tell you who I may or may not have seen even if I wanted to. I would, however like to point out that posh people generally do wees the same as everybody else in my recent experience). It even had specific words in it that I wasn't allowed to use in conjunction with anything I said on the subject, which eliminated most of the nouns and verbs I could use to talk around the situation.

The only word that seems to be left to me at this point is "hat". SERIOUSLY YOU GUYS, WHAT IS WITH YOUR HATS? First of all, where are men even getting these top hats? Is this an item in every Englishman's wardrobe that I didn't know about? Can you rent them? Why don't more top hat wearers grow mutton chops, which in my mind is the entire point of wearing a top hat? Also, god forbid that you take your hat off. There are people walking around, mostly men, also wearing hats, politely taking people aside and saying "Sir, I am afraid you can't be in this area without a hat" and then the other guy goes "Oh sorry, my bad" or something a lot more stereotypically British and wealthy sounding and goes and dons a hat. And I am not kidding about stereotypically wealthy sounding Englishman - StereoNinja does a joke voice which I call Posh Old Man Voice that I think is hilarious, and I overheard a guy talking like that and started giggling, then realized he wasn't "doing" a voice, he actually talks like that.

That is just the men. The women...I don't even...seriously, WHAT IS ON YOUR HEAD? Is that...an aquarium? Mind you, I was also made to wear a hat (which was provided to me because in what universe would I own a fancy hat?), but my hat was just, you know, a hat. And sure, lots of ladies around me were also wearing hats that did in fact resemble a hat, but those hats mostly appeared to have been deliberately created to go with the dresses they were wearing, which I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure mostly were mostly the work of top class fashion designers that people who are not me will have heard of. But then the crazy hats. I am not kidding about the aquarium hat, by the way, but there were others, each one bigger, weirder and less hat-like than the next. Oh and also a camera crew running around the place all day long grabbing crazy-hatted women and stuffing a microphone in their face and saying "TELL ME ABOUT YOUR HAT!" I really, truly, could not have been more out of my element in this setting if it had taken place on Venus.

Oh, as far as who I maybe did or didn't see: I think it is probably within the rules to report that, as predicted, I recognized not one single person. The closest I got was when I was coming out of the ladies toilets (which have baskets full of hair pins and extra nylons and other assorted things it would never occur to me to provide for my guests) and one of the other workers said to me, "Oh, you just missed [REDACTED] going by! She was right over here not two minutes ago!" to which I replied "Huh. Neat." because there was a zero percent chance I would have known who that was without being told even if I had been there when she walked by.

Finally, I would just like to report that [REDACTED]*-drawn coaches look all fancy and cool, but really they just go too slow and back up traffic for miles and shit all over the road.



*For real, the thingy I signed says I can't use that word if I talk about this.

Where's amberance?

I'm not allowed to tell you where I am and I'm not allowed to tell you what I'm doing. I'm not allowed to tell you who else is here, which I find hilarious because I don't know who anyone is to begin with.

More lack of information to follow.

Placeholder Post

Once again I find myself frantically writing two papers at the same time for graduate school and no time to blog. Additionally, I was in Chicago for a week which added lots of things to blog about but was detrimental to my having time to actually do it. Real posts forthcoming in about two weeks. Until then here's the short version:

• StereoNinja saw his first Blackhawks game and nearly left his jaw in Chicago where he dropped it in the United Center. He now totally gets why I thought the Slough Jets and their "arena" were fucking hilarious.
• I WENT ON A SUBMARINE. A SUBMARINE YOU GUYS. (It was not in the water.)
• FYI, if you have an hour and 45 minute layover in Dublin on your way to Chicago, it will not be nearly enough time to get through U.S. immigration pre-clearance and security between flights. This won't be a problem, however, because literally HALF of the people on your flight will be in that same line and they will delay the flight for twenty minutes because my country's obsession with security theater is insane. 

I will now go bury myself in anti-pornography literature and try to critique it rationally without shouting "BITCH YOU DON'T KNOW MY LIFE!" to an empty room.

Cockles And Mussels, Alive, Alive, Oh

Having seen the weather report in our area for last weekend (a month's worth of rain in 48 hours), and having failed to remember to plan anything for a trip to Prague (remembering stuff is not StereoNinja's forte and my ongoing depression battle is fucking with memory type things - I'm feeling quite a bit better by the way), StereoNinja and I decided on a last minute escape to Dublin for the weekend. (It's a good thing we did - while the flooding did not return to the levels it was at when our only road got swallowed by the Thames, we found out from neighbors that the power was out to the island from late Friday morning until Sunday afternoon. Everything in our house from the oven to the the heating is electric. It would have been like camping and as previously explained I do not camp.) And I'm kind of in love with it now.

I had never been to Dublin before, and StereoNinja had never managed to go there while also having a good time. Since I really don't know a lot about Ireland, I didn't have any real expectations of what it would be like. What it is like is awesome. Without travelling anywhere else on the Earth I haven't already been, I will say with total confidence that Dublin has the friendliest cab drivers in the world. Seriously, apart from one or two guys (we took cabs EVERYWHERE because we decided to escape rain by going someplace that was also pissing down rain because we're imbeciles) every cab driver wanted to know all about us and what brought us to Dublin, professed to adore America, gave informal city tours complete with history about buildings (which sometimes have no windows because England used to tax windows so they just built them without any because fuck you), gave solicited and unsolicited advice on what we should see and where we should drink, and generally rounded fares down to avoid anyone have to deal with coins which I thought was great because I despise them.

I was a bit worried before we got on the plane about whether there would be anything for me to eat there. Since I don't like potatoes, and the stereotype of Ireland is that everything is made out of potatoes there, I was somewhat concerned that I might starve to death. This turned out to be entirely unfounded. The restaurants in Dublin are universally spectacular, based on the fact that every time one of us said "Do you want to just go in here?" the food there was so good I had to be restrained from humping it. Maybe the best Italian restaurant I've ever been to in my life was in Dublin (amaretto tiramisu you guys. AMARETTO TIRAMISU). We went to a french place for lunch and I loved it, and if you remember I wouldn't eat much of anything when I was in actual France.

We also partook of Dublin's many museums. Recommended for nerds: The Science Gallery at Trinity College, currently running the "Fail Better" exhibit - a collection of inventions that didn't work, but which led to advances in science or some other positive contribution. Recommended for sheer hilarity: The Ireland Natural History Museum, which seems to basically be a room full of taxidermied animals of varying age, quality, and disrepair. The fucking massive extinct deer skeletons near the entrance are singularly impressive. The basking shark hanging from the ceiling, if I'm being kind, has probably seen better days. To be fair to the museum, the upper and lower floors of it are currently closed, but on the other hand it is severely lacking in any information on the animals apart from their name.

Deer: huge; impressive.

Basking shark: c'mon, man.

Our first cab driver, upon hearing that we wanted to go hear some real Irish music, directed us to the Brazen Head, which is self described as the oldest pub in Ireland. It was described by the cab driver as "nearly a thousand years old". It's actually a little over 900 years old, but I suppose "nearly a thousand" is correct depending on where you're rounding from. We met a nice German kid there, but did not meet the Brazilians who were also in the house. I know they were there because of the gregarious and extremely drunk Irishman who kept shouting at them, "BRAZIL? BRAZIL? THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING IN DUBLIN ALL THE WAY FROM BRAZIL?" There was a little group in the corner playing, who unfortunately had a broken amplifier and were therefore mostly drowned out by the noise from the table of vapid, oblivious women who were all talking at once AS LOUD AS POSSIBLE and failed to notice either the music or the collective death stare of literally everyone else in the room. That was until an enterprising guy at the next table started a shushing campaign that grew until the ENTIRE pub would hiss at them every time they got out of hand.

We also checked out the Guinness Storehouse, home of all things Guinness. For those of you Americans who have been to the Budweiser brewery in St. Louis, just, no. The Storehouse makes that place look like a miniaturized Lego model of a brewery, it is that massive. Additionally, when you get up to the top where your free pint of Guinness awaits you, not only do they take the time and care to draw you a lovely shamrock in your foam, but the 360 degree windows that make up the walls of the room give you an aerial view of the entirety of Dublin and beyond, all the way to the mountains in one directions and all the way to the sea in another. Of course, I used the opportunity to text Cap and taunt him because I am an asshole sister.

Enjoy your beer, insignificant speck of a human.

Dublin, with its abundant cabs, myriad of pubs, river flowing through it, cool stuff to do, nice people, great food and many college students, reminded me quite a lot of Chicago. Except for this one thing that happened that made me realize how spoiled Americans are. Because one thing we have precious little of in America is domestic terrorism. When bombs go off at the Boston Marathon or Oklahoma City or the Atlanta Olympics, they are weird, isolated things that shock us because it is not a thing that happens in America, so infrequently in fact that we don't even think about it and take that for granted. Meanwhile, in Dublin, in our first cab on the way to the hotel, the very friendly cab driver/tour guide/historian said to us, "This is a great area right here. It used to have statues absolutely everywhere, on all these corners. But of course the IRA blew them all up." And he said it with such casual resignation, because stuff used to blow up there - a lot - and that was his normal. So, you know, be aware of how lucky you are and shit, because you could think that all your statues blowing up is normal.

ANYBUTT, I fucking LOVED Dublin, as evidenced by everything that came out of my mouth while we were there was prefaced by "Next time we come, we should..." and that's just not something I typically say because I am of the television generation and easily bored. You should totally go there if you like doing things that are fun and/or being around nice people. You should probably also be okay with a bit of rain and own an umbrella.

A Question Deserves An Answer

Anonymous said... 

Where for art thou Amberance? 

10:49 PM 

Very good question, anonymous. It's been a rough couple of months. Moving to a new country, even one that you love, is emotionally more difficult than it is possible to prepare for. Christmas, which is normally my FAVORITE THING IN THE WHOLE FUCKING WORLD, was mostly a nightmare, and my birthday, which is Sunday and which I would normally have been reminding you all about on a daily basis for the last six weeks is only being observed at all this year to appease StereoNinja, who has made it very clear that my strategy of hiding in the bedroom ignoring him (and everyone else) while failing to engage in any of my beloved hobbies (blogging, my birthday, gratuitous nudity) is no longer acceptable. Having now spoken to a number of people who have already done this, I've had to severely lower my expectations for the foreseeable future, as the collective wisdom of those who have gone before me is that I will continue to burst into tears at completely random intervals due to vicious and overwhelming homesickness for at least 18 months. I don't even want to talk about how miserable I was on New Years, though at least I managed to leave Devon the day before it disappeared into the sea.

I have two papers due in a week, so as I said in November, let me get those written and turned in, and then check back here as I plan to reward myself by writing the next Fifty Shades review and/or going to Prague (oh yeah, I've decided I want to spend a weekend in Prague though I have absolutely no idea what is actually in Prague or why I want to go there - my main motivation seems to be the ability to say "When I was in Prague over the weekend..." - so advice on what I should actually DO in Prague would be lovely). I've been ready to write it for a while actually, but have been putting it off because I felt that I was upset about the wrong things and was trying to adjust my rage to match my logic. It hasn't worked, so I'm just going to write it the way I'm feeling it and then pack my bags for my journey to Hades since I am a terrible person.

Where I am at this very minute is sitting in my living room looking out at the sea. While all you guys in the U.S. have been at the travelling Antarctica Experience exhibition this week (the first time I saw someone write "Chiberia" made me laugh much harder than was probably warranted), the U.K. has been dealing with its own disastrous weather since roughly Christmas, mostly in the form of massive rainstorms combined with extremely high tides and a recent habit of building homes on floodplains. In typical British fashion, this was described on the news in the most hilariously understated way possible as "unusual weather". Living on an island in the Thames as I do, it is impossible not to notice. The field directly across the river from us which is typically filled with sheep first became a lake (which I named Lake Titicacao because tits! and chocolate! and I'm a massive child!) and then a few days ago even that was swallowed up and now the whole thing is just part of the river. Our marina is entirely flooded, the water covering not only the gangway that goes around the outside of the marina but also the first two steps leading up to our garden It is an inch from covering the third, which would leave only two more stairs before we go from living on riverfront property to living in the actual river. There are two roads leading into the island, but only one road that leads away from it, and that road is also flooded, meaning I actually drove my car through the Thames twice this morning. I was lucky I made it through - on my way back, there were two cars stranded on the road who had tried to drive through the river but were too low profile to get through and were now stranded in non-working cars waiting for rescue. If the river doesn't crest today I may be stranded here all weekend. Every once in a while, a helicopter flies over and I imagine them looking down at us and saying "Yep, still flooded." I think I should write a really rude message for them or draw some tits so their day will be more interesting.

Anyway, give me a week to finish my papers and I will write you guys a scathing review about how E.L. James has apparently never been to a bank and being threatened with rape is super romantic. 

P.S. I have enjoyed answering this question. Feel free to send me more questions you would like answers to and I'll answer them in a future blog post. It will be like a conversation!

Sorry, Dudes.

Hey. So I know I failed at the last 4 days of NaBloPoMo, which I'm sorry about, but the school stuff has come up again, and the Christmas stuff, and the depression fatigue/dullness. I have read the next batch of chapters, two of which I live tweeted (I have updated that post with a transcript in case you missed it). I'll get something up soon. It felt good blogging again, I don't want to slip back into not doing it again.

Important Safety Information

Still working on my paper. Here for your entertainment is something from years ago that popped into my head the other day for reasons I can't remember:

Terrorism Preparedness Guide

Stay vigilant against those arrows, y'all.

Total Written Nonsense

It's not really helping with my paper situation that I just happened to have packed as many social obligations into this week as I normally allow for in 6 months. On Saturday night, StereoNinja and I were at a charity ball. I wore a long evening gown because it was a ball and in my head that's what you wear to a ball. I've seen Cinderella, I know what goes down. Realizing that I am the worst ever at being a girl, StereoNinja checked with a couple women at work who were going and who told him no one wears long dresses, which he relayed to me in fear that I would be the only one in a long dress and would be mortified. And there was a time when that may have been the case, but once you've been naked on stage, wearing any sort of clothes in public seems pointless, so I wore it anyway. I was not the only one - there were loads of women in long dresses which I pointed out triumphantly and repeatedly every time another one walked in to the room, though in absolute fairness I think I was the only one under 50 wearing one. WHATEVER I LOOKED FABULOUS. Particularly after I took the little confetti foil stars that were adorning our table and stuck a dozen of them to my chest. They stayed on all night and now our house has a bunch of stars all over the floor.

Tonight was a Gary Numan concert in Brighton. I was complaining on the way home that I had nothing to write about for NaBloPoMo this week and StereoNinja was all "But we just left Gary Numan" and I was like "It's a blog, not a fucking diary. Nobody wants to hear about every stupid thing that I'm doing." and he frowned at me and said "Maybe you should write about how your boyfriend doesn't know the difference between a blog and a diary." So...that happened.

Tomorrow we are going to a They Might Be Giants concert, so maybe there will be something I can write about that, or if not I'm sure there's some kind of new cat video I could get my hands on. This is the internet, after all. As soon as my paper is done on Friday, I'll get to work on another 50 Shades post.

I'm Already Pretty Good At This, Actually

I am really busy writing a paper for class this week. (I am also really busy freaking out about it because I don't remember how to write a fucking paper without swearing or sarcasm. See?) So my NaBloPoMo posts this week are going to be pretty shitty, at least until Friday. In the meantime, please enjoy the new Reverend Horton Heat Video, which stars my dance teacher Michelle L'Amour and some of the Chicago Starlets, two of whom are friends from my student show class who I am very proud of:

Reverend Horton Heat - Let Me Teach You How to Eat

This Post Will Not Be Funny

I just wanted to point out here that it was in no way my intention to write a post saying I was back from hiatus and then immediately disappear for another month. I had thought that when my job ended and I had all kinds of free time, I would fall right back into regular blogging just like old times. What I neglected to take into account is that stress and depression are fabulous at inducing writer's block whilst simultaneously making even the smallest task seem like such a gargantuan effort that you are already exhausted before you even begin.

Here's a thing they don't really tell you when you are being treated for depression on a long term basis - being properly medicated and being able to cope with life for long periods of time can cause you to develop a false sense of security about yourself. This only becomes a problem when you get into situations in your life that you aren't able to effectively cope with, and something that would have been a really bad low before you  got help and learned how to deal with things becomes even worse because you know, logically, that you are over-reacting and yet you still can't make it stop. The whole thing becomes one big downward slide into a pool of self hatred and an inner monologue is telling you that you KNOW what the problem is, so just fucking FIX it, but you can't fix it, so obviously you are a COMPLETE FAILURE AT EVERYTHING. And since you are a complete failure at everything, you start to reason that no one likes you because WHY SHOULD THEY SINCE YOU SUCK, and you fail to reach out to the people who love you and could help you back. But again, you KNOW, logically, that this is stupid and it's just the depression talking, and of course you should have reached out and asked for help, dumbass, but you're stupid and now you've let everyone down AGAIN because you are a COMPLETE FAILURE. Et cetera, et cetera, until either you crash and have a public meltdown on Twitter, or someone close to you calls you out on your poorly hidden breakdown and forces you to let them help you. Or both (I have amazing and supportive Twitter followers and the most incredible boyfriend on the planet, THANK YOU).

Anyway, enough of that. My point is, being done with work did absolutely nothing to alleviate the stress of moving to another country, or going back to school in the hope of starting over from scratch with a completely different career, or choreographing and costuming a solo burlesque dance routine for the first time, or, as I finally got around to yesterday, breaking the news to an emotionally fragile and somewhat dependent roommate that I am moving 4,000 miles away from him and he's on his own (it is not going very well). And that's why I disappeared again and why I can't promise you that it won't happen yet again right after this post either. But I'm trying. And I have plans. One of which is that I am thinking about reviewing another horrible book for NaBloPoMo this year. If you think this is a good idea, feel free to leave me some suggestions on what you think I would really hate (excluding Twilight because Mark over at Mark Reads has already done that as brilliantly as it will ever be done). I WILL get back to where I remember how to do this and be funny at it, I just can't promise you exactly when. I am really hoping it's now.

Is This Snails?

The trouble with trying to travel anywhere with me (for that matter, the trouble with trying to have a meal with me at home) is that at 35 years old I still have the palate of a child of 6. If it's not made out of pasta or bread I probably don't want it, and if it contains words I can't pronounce or sounds in any way exotic there is absolutely zero chance you are going to get me to put it in my mouth.

StereoNinja took me to Paris in March after finding out I had never been there, and while this was still in the planning stages I had decided, based on exactly no evidence or research whatsoever, that there was absolutely nothing to eat in France that wasn't made out of snails (except perhaps crepes, but those sounded suspicious to me in their own right because they've been described to me as "like a pancake" except they are not a pancake and why can't I just have a pancake? Plus they are probably stuffed full of snails) and I was probably going to starve to death. StereoNinja insisted both that this wasn't remotely true and French cuisine is some of the finest in the world, and that even if it were true, snails are delicious and I would love them. They are drowning in butter and garlic, he reasoned, which is what I drown practically everything I eat in, so there should be no problem. I countered that I would prefer to enjoy my butter and garlic without massive boogers floating in it.

In the end I managed to avoid eating any snails. In fact I ate very little of anything, not because I was being an obnoxious child, but because there are specific times designated for eating in France, and good fucking luck to you finding a single open restaurant if the time you are hungry is outside of those appointed times. What I did manage to find to eat was a Mexican restaurant just down the block from our hotel, because when you go to France for the first time in your life, it makes complete sense to eat food that you can get on practically every corner of the city you actually live in, but of better quality and 1/3 of the price. I didn't care - fajitas are something I know for a fact I don't hate and I wanted a friggin margarita (I drank four). Besides which, I now get to tell the story of how StereoNinja took me to France and I insisted on eating Mexican food the entire time.

We also spent a day in the Centre Georges Pompidou because StereoNinja is an artist and also CULTURE. Unfortunately, being surrounded by "culture" isn't something that typically makes me behave like a grown up in public. This day was no exception. It started with this kid who clearly fancied himself some sort of artiste as evidenced by his skin tight bright blue trousers and jaunty hat, which someone must have told him was the uniform. He was walking around looking very very serious about things and nodding solemnly and I was doubled over laughing. There was also a pink painting with a couple of dark vertical slits:

I refused to believe this painting wasn't called "Two Vaginas".

a giant room filled with ceiling high rolls of what appeared to be burlap, which looked for all the world like the back room of my uncles' floor covering shop where they keep all of the giant rolls of linoleum (this room caused me to turn to StereoNinja and say "I'm sorry but I really don't understand 'your people'."), and several phallic sculptures, every one of which I made StereoNinja take a photo of me pretending to suck off:

Evidence that I should not be allowed in public.

Not pictured: maturity.

For some reason I was far better behaved at the Moulin Rouge despite being completely surrounded by boobies and drinking half a bottle of champagne, apart from the fact that there was one male dancer who bore a striking resemblance to my date, and I kept referring to him as "Young [StereoNinja]", much to Old StereoNinja's irritation. I'm really not sure why he likes me. I'm starting to think he's not a real ninja*.

*OR IS HE?

Here We Go

Right. It's May now, and I don't have a job anymore, and I promised you that I would start posting again when that happened, so I'm going to start doing that right now. I need to post about France, I need to post about the meet-up, and I need to finish reading that damn book so I can light it on fire. But as I'm just getting back into the swing of this, the first post you are going to get is one about a spider. Honestly, if you've been reading me for more than five minutes, you should have seen that one coming.

So yesterday, while I was waiting for StereoNinja to finish watching Doctor Who so we could Skype and discuss the fact that Vastra, Jenny and Strax need a their own spin-off show, I went into my room to sit on the bed and play Candy Crush Saga, again, because I can't fucking stop and should never have downloaded it to begin with, and as soon as I sat down, I sensed movement just above my window. I looked up to see a very big, very black spot that should not have been there and for one brief second I was hopeful - normal spiders that you find inside your house in Chicago are usually medium sized brownish- or greenish-yellow things, and this was big and very very black and so maybe it was just a beetle or something. But then it started moving. The one magical power I think all arachnophobes probably have is the ability to tell whether something is a spider or not based on the way it moves, because NOTHING ELSE IN THE WORLD crawls with such deliberate, malevolent evil. I can tell you whether or not something is a spider from the other side of the room without my glasses on and while crying a waterfall of terrified tears. And THIS, my friends, was a fucking spider if I ever saw one.

I immediately began a barrage of insane text messages to StereoNinja, who was ineffectively 4000 miles away from being able to solve my problem:

OMG WTF BIG FAT SPIDER IN MY ROOM HELP HELP

IT WENT BEHIND THE CURTAIN I CAN'T SEE IT

THIS IS BAD

IT'S BACK IT'S HEADED FOR THE FREEZER IF IT GOES BY THE DOOR I'LL BE TRAPPED

IT'S GOING TOWARD THE DOOR OH GOD

I'M TRAPPED

NOW IT'S COMING FOR ME WHAT DO I DO

FUCK IT'S CLIMBING DOWN

IT IS ON THE CEILING OVER MY BED THIS IS A NIGHTMARE

It was at this point that StereoNinja decided to call me. In the time that I have known StereoNinja, he has only ever seen me have a spider meltdown once. It was on the weekend we met when we were both standing outside waiting to have our photos taken at our cousin's wedding and the garden was fucking full of them. I was crouched in the middle of the patio in my bridesmaid dress hyperventilating, but doing my very best to keep it together long enough for the photos, and he had no way of knowing at the time how bad I usually am. Consequently he was unprepared, and I dare say slightly irritated to find that his normally extremely rational girlfriend who worships at the altar of science will lose every shred of logical reasoning she ever possessed when faced with an arachnid. "It's trying to get me," I said by way of greeting. "No it isn't," he responded calmly. It went downhill from there.

First he tried suggesting that I do things to it - hit it with something, a towel maybe?, knock it off the wall and then I can squish it, or failing that put a jar over top of it so it can't get out. His alternative solution was for me to simply leave the room. The relationship is still new, you guys, he just didn't know. I shot down every single one of his completely rational solutions based on my own insanity - getting close enough to hit it with anything might cause it to GET ON ME, I could not predict the trajectory it would take when it fell and I could lose it or it could GET ON ME, if I squished it it might escape and GET ON ME, ditto putting a jar on top of it, and leaving the room would be the worst of all because I might not be able to find it later but it will still be there, WAITING, and I will never be able to go in my room ever again. As I explained this nonsense, it crawled over my bed and started heading down the wall toward it, and I completely lost my shit. "See?!?!? It's trying to get me! It's trying to get on my bed! They are after me! It wants to kill me!"

He decided to try a different approach. "It's not after you. You know that, right? You know that it can't be after you because they don't have an intelligence to do that."

"I don't know anything right now. They ARE after me, why else would it be going towards the bed? Why are they only ever in my room?"

"They're not just in your room. They can be in any room."

"Yes they are. They are in my room MORE THAN CHANCE."

"No they aren't."

"I have NEVER seen one in the dining room. EVER."

He finally realized he was not dealing with a sane person, and came up with a suggestion that worked: I texted the bartender in his bedroom to tell him there was a spider in mine. He came right away to examine it, then came back with a jar and an index card. Normally I would insist that he squish it right there, then flush it down the toilet, then flush a couple more times, then wash his hands before he touched anything, but this one was big and black and not the sort of spider you normally find in the house. We didn't even realize what it was until he got the jar over top of it and it went nuts: it's one of those black jumping spiders you normally find on the outsides of buildings or sometimes on plants. Except, about four times the size as a normal one. I had a secondary freak out over the fact that it could have just jumped right ON ME at any time during the whole ordeal and WHY IN THE FUCK WAS IT SO BIG.

Crisis averted, I called StereoNinja back, who described to me his idea for the ultimate spider removal system for people like me, with a reach length of nearly an entire room and built in fail-safes for every possible escape attempt. It only had one design flaw: the fact that I would need it to be wielded by someone else for fear that the spider might GET ON ME.

Unintentional Hiatus FAQ

Were you kidnapped and killed at the 50 Shades meet up?

No, no one has been kidnapped and nobody died. Unless you mean OF LAUGHTER. We had an absolutely awesome time, once we completely abandoned the 50 Shades party game, which sucked horse cadaver balls, and switched to Cards Against Humanity (which is also when we found out that we are all terrible people). I am excited about the real post when I will actually tell you about it.

In that case, where the hell have you been?

All over the place, both mentally and figuratively. I was in England and in France for a good while, during which I was somehow remarkably busy, and then I came back to Chicago to an unbelievable amount of crap going on. I have so much to do that sometimes I get overwhelmed and I call up StereoNinja and cry at him. Not to him. AT him.

What kind of crap?

Oh well, let's see...there's the part where I'm losing my job at the end of this month and I'm frantically putting together notes for the handover to the people who are going to start doing my job and also my boss is panicking and making me INSANE and also BrownsFan is already gone and I CANNOT COPE WITHOUT HER. There's also the thing where I spent Sunday to Wednesday of this week systematically calling everyone in my family and telling them that a) I am leaving forever in a few months, and b) I have been hiding information and/or lying to them for MONTHS now, for a very good reason but lying nonetheless, which fortunately they were all really, really, REALLY understanding and very nice about. And let's not forget the part where I'm making up a dance and a costume and a new name so I can get on stage in less than three months and take my clothes of to music, which reminds me...in related news, I seem to have become involved with a group of very nice people who spend their Tuesday nights drawing pictures of a naked person for two hours. (The naked person is me.)

What ever happened to that thing where you claimed you were moving to England?

Well, that's actually the thing that is taking up all of my time and energy and preventing me from blogging. I can tell you now that I have been accepted into my first choice of graduate school, which is in London, and will be starting my program in October. Which means that in between now and then I have to get rid of 95% of my earthly belongings, sort out shipping and/or storage for the other 5%, gather all the cash up front that I will need for both tuition and living expenses and then prove to both the school and the British government that I have it just sitting there in cash and that they won't have to support my freeloading American ass through social services, apply for a visa, go to an interview for said visa, buy a plane ticket, and literally dozens of other tasks both big and small that come with the decision to move to a different country.

Are you ever going to blog again?

YES OH MY GOD YES. I miss it so, so much, I can't even describe it. But seriously, I am completely wiped out right now. I think if you guys can just give me til the end of April, I can get back to more regular posting and shenanigans. I'll still have all this moving and dance stuff to do, but I won't have a job anymore starting May 1, so that should free up some time, stress, and brain space for the shit I actually LIKE doing.
Don't get me wrong - everything is GREAT right now and I am happier than I have ever been in my entire life. It's just that there's TONS of work involved with my life being this great, and a looming deadline to get all of that work done. I'm trying really hard to get back here, I really miss you guys.

50 Shades Meet Up And Why This Post Is Not About France

Hello everyone! I'm just back from France today, and I absolutely owe you a post about snails, art museum shenanigans, and a mariachi band. However this post is just a short one in order to update everyone who is not on the email list about the 50 Shades party game meet up happening this Sunday evening. I was absolutely planning to post my France recap (entitled "Is This Snails?" because I had decided that probably everything was made out of snails, including cups of tea, which I needn't have worried about because there IS NO FUCKING TEA ANYWHERE IN FRANCE) tonight, as I am currently sat in a hotel by myself for the express purpose of catching up the blog and the email and the twittering I've missed whilst I've been away. But then I got back from the trip and started unpacking, at which time I reached into my bag and ended up taking a massive chunk out of my finger with the razor blade I had carelessly thrown in there with no blade guard LIKE A DUMBASS, so right now I'm typing this with my left ring finger held up in the air because it really, really, REALLY fucking hurts. It's not a good situation. I bled through three plasters (Americans: plasters = band-aids) earlier.

ANYSUCK, I'll either post about France when I can type like a normal human being without screaming every time I touch something, or I'll bat my eyelashes at StereoNinja and try to get him to type it for me with me dictating, but I suspect he'll merely laugh at that suggestion.

So, the meet up! It's this Sunday the 10th. I've reserved a table at the Green Man pub on Euston Road in London for 5 pm because it's much easier to play table games with the use of an actual table. I've never been there, but it was suggested by one of you lovely folks, I can get there via tube, and they let me book a table online without having to speak to any strangers or pretend like I know what I'm doing. I can't wait to meet you all and I'll see you Sunday!

No, Seriously, I Have A Real Excuse

OK, so I'm being a terrible blogger - I have a book review to finish by the end of this month and I haven't made a video since my birthday - but I do actually have a reason for once.

That reason is that my timetable for the life-rearranging I have been hinting at for months has been pushed up significantly, and I am scrambling to update my CV and also assemble paperwork and fill out applications for graduate programs with looming deadlines and write statements of varying lengths about how much I heart learning and why I specifically want to learn these particular things, and I can't devote my full attention to that and also make up new swears for you guys and expect to actually succeed at my ultimate goal, which I am happy to report, I can now state fairly openly (in as far as I don't think any of the people I haven't spoken to yet read this regularly, and if they do, hi, and sorry you're finding out this way), is to move to the UK.

That was an incredibly long sentence and is not indicative of the quality of sentences I am using in my position statements on any of these applications, I assure you.

Point being, my absence is legit for once, and that I haven't stopped writing; I'm just writing something else at the moment, and it is important. And also that I will return to normal very, very soon since I have to finish the book review by the end of February so I can give the stupid book back to its owner.

In the meantime, in an attempt to make this up to you, I took the liberty of googling "weird knitting projects" for you guys. The image search results are here. I am particularly impressed with the knitted turd about 9 rows down and this fucking insane corpse:

You're welcome.