I will have no hesitation in smashing your dolls cupboard with a hammer.

--Humorous thing in my e-mail inbox this morning: "A publishing event... Barbara Streisand's My Passion for Design!" Yes indeed, Penguin.

--I don't like Josh Groban's Christmas CD. Josh is cool in my book. His rendition of "Anthem" gives me chills. But that CD? Blows. Way too tame and mellow. He could have done so much better. Faith Hill somehow turns "The First Noel" into a riffing contest. Stop that, Faith.

--China Mievelle is coming to my school in a few weeks. I've never read anything by him, but he's won lots of awards, is alternatingly championed and lampooned on one of the sites I go to for book recommendations, and "consciously attempts to move fantasy away from commercial, genre clichés of Tolkien epigones," which I like, so maybe I will take this opportunity to read something of his and then go see him talk. My Marxist poetry teacher is very excited about his coming.

--By that I mean my poetry teacher who is a Marxist, not a teacher of Marxist poetry. That would probably be a boring subject. Also, I don't think I've ever seen the word "epigone" before.

--A Nickelback song was playing while I was shopping for a new toothbrush a few days ago, and I came to the conclusion that I really dislike the sentiment that we should "live like we're dying" or like it's our last day on earth or whatever. If I knew for a fact that it was my last day alive, I would face-plant into carton of french vanilla ice cream and stay there all day. Then I'd probably take a bunch of pills and tell the survivors to throw my body in the ocean. That's probably not what Nickelback is going for. I guess "Live like you're on a strict time frame and have important stuff to do" isn't as catchy, though.

--I went to a concert for one half of the Indigo Girls last night. Whoa. So many lesbians. So many lesbians who love Amy Ray. I was rather out of place. The Mount Holyoke lesbians were staring at me.

--This is the best website ever for a daily dose of awww. I don't know what my dog fixation has been all about lately.

--I went home last weekend to take the GRE up in Portsmouth, since there was weirdly no place nearby that offered it, even though Western Massachusetts is collegeville. I did okay, considering I literally had no idea what was on it or how it was structured, but I was vaguely bemused by the fact that the whole test is a blatant money grab. They advertised "IMPROVE YOUR SCORE!" books and classes in between sections of the test. Like, what? Also, it seems to me that the GRE is also a little unbalanced, since I, an English major who has not taken a math course in four years and was fumbling around to remember basic things like how to get the area of a triangle, somehow ended up with the same score in both sections. Curious.

--Speaking of Western Massachusetts, I was in line at Starbucks today and the baristas were shouting out the names of the people in front of me. The Caucasian mother-son pair directly in front of me was named Freida and Cisco, and both wearing purple turtlenecks with an admirable, even enviable, level of confidence. Only here. And maybe Norway.

--Also, I took the GRE in a "Sylvan Learning Center," whose commercials I had, of course, seen a skillion times, but which I'd never seen in person. It was a weird place. All the people working there were barefoot and it was hot as a motherfucking greenhouse.

--After the test was over I went to a bar with my brother and a friend. There's this Boston-based radio station, KISS 108, that has "dance parties" every Friday night which feature "the hottest jams" and "celebrity guests." You know, like, dumb mixes of hip hop songs and stuff. For some reason, they chose to host one of these parties at the bar I went to - which is like, an hour outside Boston - and, not to blow their cover, but they're not being honest in their advertisements. It was the lamest dance party ever, and this is coming from a very lame person indeed. Their celebrity guest was Abram of Road Rules/The Challenge/other-MTV-recycling-projects fame. He's a lot shorter than he seems and, sorry to say, looks a lot older than he does on TV.

--I'm not seeing Harry Potter on opening night. Which is two hours from now. This is sad. Those midnight shows are the biggest congregations of nutjobs in the world. Luckily it's only part one. Part two will be the important one. I anticipate a lot of tears and a few suicides in the audience of that one. Though this is the one where Dobby dies, I think, so maybe this one'll be that way, too.

--Resumed an Italian book, Due di due by Andrea de Carlo, which I'd started in Italy and had kind of forgotten over the summer. I've been reading it surprisingly fluidly; I've been reaching for the dictionary very sparingly, and I've only got about a hundred pages left. In a way, though, it's sort of cheating. Most Italian books are written in this really annoying and very irregular past tense that I never bothered to learn well, but this book is written in a more normal way. Still though. First full Italian book I'll have read on my own, when it's finished. That's kind of exciting. I've read lots of short stories, excerpts and poems, but never a full novel.

--Also working slowly through Middlemarch again. Very little at a time. Not even a chapter a night, usually, but I think I'm back to the point I had reached before throwing it aside last time. I probably won't finish it until after the semester's over. I'm too busy, and quiet time is scarce. It has to be very quiet around when I'm reading that particular book. Her genius is just so overwhelming on every page. What a mind that woman had. Jesus. I think I've mentioned that stupid moleskine notebook I bought a while ago? I mostly use it now just to write down quotes and stuff that I like, and it is littered with quotes from the first time I started Middlemarch. Now I've gone and jotted down an entirely different set of quotes from the second time through the same material. She's that good. Daunting, but good.

--iTunes just updated and somehow unearthed about two hundred songs I'd tossed from my library. Most of it went right back to the trash pile, but, thank God, I have "My Humps" at my disposal once again.

--I just signed up for a Polish film class for next semester. I'm hoping to tap into the part of my heritage that I know nothing about, namely, all of it. The class is in the Comp-Lit department. I'm also hoping to find out what Comp-Lit is. No one can explain it to me.

--Speaking of that, I have this quasi-semi-internship thing right now (and I say quasi-semi because while I don't earn money or credits for school, I am, in fact, paid in food), and the guy running it was not receiving my e-mails for a long time. We determined that this was because my e-mail address is my first initial combined with my last name, which looks exactly like the random splash of letters used by spambots. Oh, the delights of being of Polish descent.

--I spent this whole entry trying to come up with a witty line of Marxist poetry I could insert into that comment up at the top. No luck.

--Later. Happy Thanksgiving.