Filling in the blanks...

Hello? Anyone still there? Well, if you've found your way back here, hello! I'm not dead, and it's about time my poor abandoned blog got a kick up the back end. Rather than a detailed, chronological account of the last month, I'll try and get down all the good stuff as it comes to me. A pretty obvious theme for the last month is that it has been bloody freezing here. Literally, there were a couple of weeks where the temperature ranged from - 3 to - 11, I was not impressed. For some reason the last two days have been decidedly mild, very much giving the impression of impending spring, but I've seen the weather forecasts, and it's back to winter next week. There is one compensation to it being so cold. One morning I looked out of my bedroom window and saw this:

Snow. Everywhere. Admittedly not a huge amount, but enough to keep me happy, and about half of the students at school from turning up, very naughty. This was the view from school:




Because of all the yukky pollution here, the snow went black pretty quick and is currently very grey and slushy and unpleasant. Of course the boots I bought to handle such weather broke on the day it first snowed, but I have since fixed them with superduper glue and all is well once more. The snow and the cold and the vast amount of reading I have to do for my 5 classes has been keeping me indoors a lot, which means other than watching large quantities of Grey's Anatomy, Lost and Neighbours (but really, that's all I do watch so it's not that bad, even though the Grauniad says TV is going to kill us all) I've been seeing a lot of films and reading a lot of books. Mostly rubbish on the films front unfortunately, but I did have a Guillermo del Toro double bill, Hellboy followed by Pan's Labyrinth. Quite a leap from one to the other, Hellboy just being another one of that awful string of comics-turned-films complete with crap Nazi scientist baddies and generally rubbish script. Pan's Labyrinth was completely different, apart from the fascists, and randomly, the same prop used for collecting blood - funny that. I thought it was fantastic, showing the world through the eyes of a child whose mother marries a captain in Franco's Spain, and a suitably dark world it was too. I'm all for children not being depicted as little creatures of fluff and light, and this certainly had plenty of nitty gritty and some few genuinely horrifying scenes. Best thing I've seen for ages, highly recommended. Other than that, because I'm a New Yorker with my ear to the ground (yeah right) I got to see a free preview of Hannibal Rising, the new prequel to the series. Not bad, not great either, Hannibal just isn't as scary when he's all unsophisticated and stabby. But hey, it was free, so I was happy.
Other less free events that got me out of my room were a trip to the ever wonderful Poetry Slam at the Bowery, and a venture to the Living Room to see Madeleine Peyroux. They aren't kidding, the venue is pretty tiny and fully seated - of which I am a big fan - and the colour scheme makes you feel like you're inside a bar of chocolate, an impression only increased by the music. Though I'd have loved to have had all my friends with me, it was pretty exciting to be at a drinking venue and be fairly confident I was one of the youngest people there. I don't get to be the youngest much these days. The gig itself was fantastic, a total reworking of the recorded stuff and a total dream, I can't believe I passed up the chance to see her in London, d'oh.
What else... Valentine's was, as expected, a non-event although Kassie and I binged out on chocolate and shitty rom coms (with john cusack so permissable) so it was not altogether unsatisfactory. For the weekend I went up to see Jen in MA and we did Valetine's in a more progressive fashion, seeing the Vagina Monologues for the second year running (and it was still great this year) followed by a rather interesting drag ball. Which at least makes constumes easier...


I definitely should wear a tie more often, methinks. It was a fantabulous weekend, and it's nice to know that even if I'm not using them very much these days, I do still have some social skills. Hmm, I'm definitely running out of exciting events here, unless of course you want to hear about my botched attempts to cook rice (how hard can it be, I thought to myself) or my trip to the New York Public Library - ok, that was quite exciting, I mean, I'm a proper New Yorker now! Because last Monday was Lincoln's birthday, and this Monday was President's day (talk about gratuitous self congratulation, these guys will do anything for a holiday) Hunter declared today (Wednesday) to be a Monday - last week Thursday was a Monday - and all the confusion makes it pretty hard to remember what I'm supposed to be doing. Today, I believe, was Ash Wednesday, which was a bit of a surprise because they don't have pancake day here - figures, the one place you'd think they'd love extra food. On reflection, that explains all the people walking around with black crosses on their foreheads, excuse my religious ignorance. I did worry for a while that I was becoming a little religiously intolerant, but it turns out that I'm just intolerant of idiot, and idiotic ideas. Did I mention I've been reliably declared "insane"? I don't know about you, but it wasn't exactly a surprise on this end. Ah well, I supposed I'll struggle on somehow... but for now, I really ought to be doing some homework and getting to bed. I promise to not let the poor blog fall into such disrepair again, and hopefully I'll actually do something worth blogging about pretty soon. Night!