Someone Make Me Stop Eating

i know, i know, working out makes you burn calories, and then you should eat more... but here's what i've consumed today, and it's a bit ridiculous:

8:20 am: 1 bowl rice krispies (with "real" strawberries) with whole milk
8:45 am: 1 banana
10:30 am: 1/2 a cheddar and spinach scone from starbucks (i blame rafael...)
1:20 pm: the other 1/2 of the cheddar and spinach scone
1:25 pm: most of a bowl of kim's tofu noodle soup
1:40 pm: 1 kashi go-lean chocolate-and-peanut flavoured energy bar
5:30 pm: 2 all-butter lemon shortbread cookies
6:30 pm: 3 grape leaf wraps with tzatziki sauce, several pita quarters with hummus, and 1/2 a veggie gyro with french fries wrapped into it (plus some steamed spinach and roasted peppers on the side)
7:45 pm: 1 glass of honeydew bubble tea (latte)

i feel like a walking trash can today. someone make it stop.

I Also Hate Grocery Shopping

normally i am a big fan of spending time at the grocery store, roaming the aisles looking for sales (aka procrastinating -- the more homework there is to be done, the more time i'm willing to spend picking out food) and buying new things to use in my culinary experiments.

today, my time was even more dedicated to the supermarket, because
a) there's practically zero food at home
b) my stupid roommate, who never buys food unless goaded to come along for the ride (and whose laxness in the way of food acquisitions often directly causes situation "a", above) has gone underground for the remainder of the semester, and will eventually eat through the twelve red kidney beans, six wheat thins and one moldy tomato that we do have left and then complain that there's no food at home
c) it was super-nice out and it's the weekend, which put me in the mood for stocking up on yummy things to eat!

so off i went into the aisles of supreme food market, on 43rd and walnut. i love supreme because it's cheap, close to home, and has just about everything i need plus free home delivery (the value of which one will only realize if one is used to lugging groceries home from distant locations, and if one knows that my grocery bill is usually about $80 -- which means about 6 heavy bags of stuff). i roamed the aisles at leisure, selecting pesto sauce and carrots and hummus and stocking up on grapefruit and chickpeas and premade waffles.

so far, so good. i was already contemplating what i'd cook for dinner tonight, and making small talk with the cashier lady who had the cool-looking tattoo behind her right ear after confirming that i could get all this stuff sent home... when the story turned nasty: mr. will, the delivery guy, sauntered by, and announced that there would be no home delivery tonight.

errrm....

thus it was that i stood on the street (my shopping cart loaded with $95.75 worth of excellent things to eat but unable to leave the supreme parking lot due to the closely-placed shopping-cart-theft-prevention bars), wondered what to do, and wished like hell i had a boyfriend who would go grocery shopping with me and carry all the stuff home afterwards (for a tip, of course).

i tried to flag down cab after cab, all the while hating on mr. will, who probably just wanted the night off to enjoy the awesome weather. no luck. having exhausted my patience, i called a cab company (olde city cab) just like the good corporate-in-disguise that i am. no response. then i called victory cab, the only company whose number i could remember offhand. no go: they said the wait would be between 5 and 30 minutes. (in philadelphia, complaining is futile. and the damn cabs aren't even cheap...)

finally, a benevolent cabbie (indian, but naturally!) zigzagged across three lanes to ask where i wanted to go. i told him i had a bunch of groceries to transport 5 blocks, and he hopped out to help. good samaritans do exist! our conversation during the short drive revealed that he had been on his way home at the end of his shift when he saw me looking distressed; that he's kashmiri (and apparently i'm from bollywood...); that olde city cab is older and far more reliable than other cab companies in philly, although crazily enough their headquarters are not in olde city; and that the best number to call to get through to aforementioned olde city cab is 215.AIRPORT (so smart!).

i guess the fact that i'm now at home typing this, ex post facto, might indicate to you, dear reader, that all's well that ends well. i guess it did, for the cabbie at at least, since i tipped him roughly, oh, 100% of the fare. but one disaster was yet to strike: while unloading the seemingly-dozens of bags and carrying them lock stock and barrel over to my doorstep, the man unwittingly dropped the one bag that had a bottle of kikkoman soy sauce in it. the bottle smashed, and now the two packets of mushrooms and the bottle of milk that shared that plastic bag -- not to mention my front stoop -- smell indelibly like soy sauce.

*sigh*

i think next time i'll starve, instead.

I Hate Taxes

i'm good at addition and subtraction, but sadly, 'rithmetic isn't really all that useful (beyond figuring out potential permutations and combinations of the various deductions i could take) when it comes to getting through the tension of the season of april 15.

you see, being an international non-immigrant resident alien is complicated... not to mention that my tax status has changed in some way every year for the last 3 years, so i feel like a moving target!... and i never seem to be able to find my old returns when i need them... and this year i live in a different state from the one i've always lived in... and apparently philadelphia requires people to file city taxes (in addition to state and federal)... and i didn't file my own taxes last year, so i don't know what was going on in that mess of papers!... and i didn't even get a W-2 this year...

upon thinking about all this, actually, i've come to the conclusion that perhaps the most useful tax skill i could acquire would be the ability to get off my ass about these sorts of things before april 10.

Summer Of Books

Fifty Book Exam List

I. Historical Period: Medieval
1. The Dream of the Rood (OE, MS 950-1000)
2. Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain (Latin, 1136)
3. Song of Roland (1140-1170?)
4. Chrétien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances (“The Knight of the Cart”) (late 12th century)
5. Marie de France, Lais (“Lanval”, “Bisclavret”) (late 12th century)
6. Winner and Waster (c. 1350)
7. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1385)
8. St. Erkenwald (c. 1386)
9. Corpus Christi plays: York Creation and Fall of Lucifer, Chester Noah's Flood, Brome Abraham and Isaac, Wakefield Second Shepherd's Play, Wakefield Herod the Great, N-Town Woman Taken in Adultery, York Crucifixion, and Wakefield Last Judgment (c. 1375-1570s)
10. Geoffrey Chaucer, selections from Canterbury Tales (General Prologue, Knight, Miller, Reeve, Cook, Wife of Bath, Friar, Summoner, Clerk) (1390s)
11. Julian of Norwich, The Short Text of Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love (c. 1393)
12. Selected Middle English lyrics: Luria and Hoffman ed. nos. 6 (“Foweles in the frith”), 77 (“I have a gentil cok”), 81 (“We ben chapmen light of fote”), 90 (“May no man slepe in youre halle”), 138 (“Maiden in the mor lay”), 178 (Geoffrey Chaucer, “Lak of Stedfastnesse”), 181 (“I sing of a maiden”), 182 (“Salve Regina”), 190 (“Now goth sonne under wod”), and 197 (“A God and yet a man?”)
13. The Alliterative Morte Arthure (c. 1400)
14. Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1436)
15. ** Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory (criticism)
16. ** Tim William Machan, Textual Criticism and Middle English Texts (criticism)

II. Genre: Travels and Encounters
17. Heliodorus, Æthiopica (3rd century)
18. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (c. 1375)
19. Walter Raleigh, “Discovery of Guiana” (1596)
20. William Shakespeare, The Tempest (c. 1610)
21. Sir Thomas More, Utopia (1615)
22. Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine (1633)
23. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko or The Royal Slave (1688)
24. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1726)
25. Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
26. H.G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon (1901)
27. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902)
28. Ama Ata Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy (1977)
29. Edward Said, Orientalism (1979)
30. Amitav Ghosh, Shadow Lines (1988)
31. Martin Scorsese, Gangs of New York (2003)
32. ** Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters (criticism)

III. Theme/Theory: Form and the Material Text
33. William Langland, Piers Plowman A-Text Visio (1360s) (authorial revision)
34. William Langland, Piers Plowman B-Text Visio (Prologue-Passus 7) (1380s)
35. William Langland, Piers Plowman C-Text Visio (Prologue-Passus 9) (1380s)
36. William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Q1) (1603) (printers/publishers/authors + editions)
37. William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Q2) (1604)
38. William Shakespeare, Hamlet (F) (1623)
39. Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus A-Text (1604)
40. Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus B-Text (1616)
41. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1852) (serialization)
42. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, selected poems (1855 and 1891 editions): “A Boston Ballad” (1854), “Song of Myself” (1855), “The Sleepers” (1855), “Song of the Answerer” (1855), “Song of Myself” (1891), “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (1891), “A Boston Ballad” (1891), “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd” (1891) as well as frontispiece portraits from both editions (authorial revision, self-publication, author portraits)
43. William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience (selections) (1789; 1794) (illustrations)
44. Emily Dickinson, selected published poems: “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers —”/”The Sleeping”; “Blazing in the Gold and quenching in Purple”/”Sunset”; “I taste a liquor never brewed —”; “Publication—is the Auction”; “This is my letter to the World”; “This was a Poet—it is That”; “‘Hope’ is a thing with feathers—”; “Because I could not stop for Death” (creation of the authorial corpus; order of component texts)
45. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts including the Annotations of Ezra Pound (1971) (editorial process)
46. Alan Moore, V for Vendetta (1995) (graphic novel)
47. James McTeigue, V for Vendetta (2006) (translation into another medium)
48. ** Robert Darnton, “The Printed Word” (Section 3 of Kiss of Lamourette): “What is the History of Books?”, “The Forgotten Middlemen of Literature”, “First Steps Towards A History of Reading” (criticism)
49. ** G. Thomas Tanselle, A Rationale of Textual Criticism (criticism)
50. ** Jerome McGann, Part I of The Textual Condition (criticism)