Ten Little Chances to be Free (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tenlittlebullets) wrote2010-03-21 08:33 pm
tenlittlebullets) wrote2010-03-21 08:33 pm
Self-control: I has it, I hope?
Not exactly New Year's resolutions, but still things I ought to be able to do with a minimal application of self-control:
1. Go off my ADD meds. I have a month's supply, no way to refill until I'm back in the US, and three months before I go back. Trying to stretch it out is just making me tired and useless most of the time, so the non-stupid thing to do is to go off meds until spring break is over and deal with being a space case until then. The only catch is that my ADD gets approximately ten billion times worse for a little less than a week after I go off meds, so this week is going to be a slog.
2. Stop getting up at noon. Seriously. (This should be easier once I'm no longer trying to stretch out my meds, which makes me tired as fuck for four or five days out of the week.)
3. Stop wasting so much time in front of the goddamn computer without posting anything. Either do something USEFUL on the computer, or go do something else. For christ's sake, self, how many games of spider solitaire can you play in one afternoon? Am I going to have to take another stab at "no computer before dinner"?
To be fair, this is my last weekend of Fucking Around Without Doing Anything until... probably after Barricade Day. Next week is the Montreuil-sur-Mer trip, week after that I might have friends visiting, second week of April my mom will be in Paris, then spring break, then I might go to Edinburgh at the beginning of May, then exams, then Wave Gotik Treffen, then Barricade Day. So if I'm going to be useless and unable to concentrate on anything for the better part of a week, this week is as good as any.
Also, while lazing around I've at least been reading. Thérèse Philosophe (which is fabulous!), Les Mystères de Paris (am on page 1000 of 1300), and Le Dernier jour d'un condamné. Close to finishing all three. Thérèse is my bedroom read (not like that!--well, okay, a little) and will probably be replaced by something by Mary Renault or at least Not Nineteenth Century; Mystères de Paris is my endless feuilleton and will probably be replaced by Balzac (Père Goriot, the half of Illusions Perdues I haven't read, and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes); Dernier Jour is what I carry around in my purse, and god knows what I'll replace it with. Would love to read Fragoletta if I could find a copy that wasn't exorbitantly expensive, but... yeah. Maybe The Well of Loneliness.
I feel like I should eventually make a giant post on Mystères de Paris, because it is basically the novel most people would expect to read when picking up a book called Les Misérables. It's Dickensian in its length and profusion of minor characters and complicated subplots; it's very much a social novel about the Parisian underclass and the injustice of mid-19th-century society. It's, basically, what's missing from Les Mis--dark gritty moralistic stories about the misery of the dangerous classes. It makes me want to reread LM, because Hugo is very, very obviously riffing off of Eugène Sue, taking the same subject matter and making a sprawling Romantic novel out of it. I wouldn't go so far as to say that Les Mis is fanfiction of Mystères de Paris with the characters renamed and shuffled around, but there's something fanfiction-y about the transformative way Hugo takes the subject matter and uses it for a completely different purpose. And there are sneaky references all over the place, from the Rue Plumet to the expression "patron-minette."
Basically, while Les Mis is of course a classic novel and meant to stand on its own, Hugo probably expected his audience to have read Mystères de Paris. The understanding is that you've already read about how liberated convicts can't find work and are driven back to crime, and how kids who grow up in crapsack conditions are twisted by it, and what fate befalls abandoned women and children, so Hugo is free to make Romantic--even mythic--figures out of these people and wax eloquent about the future without belaboring the social details. Eugene Sue has already done that for him, so Hugo gets to play around with these concepts and characters and work them into his thoughts onyaoi history.
1. Go off my ADD meds. I have a month's supply, no way to refill until I'm back in the US, and three months before I go back. Trying to stretch it out is just making me tired and useless most of the time, so the non-stupid thing to do is to go off meds until spring break is over and deal with being a space case until then. The only catch is that my ADD gets approximately ten billion times worse for a little less than a week after I go off meds, so this week is going to be a slog.
2. Stop getting up at noon. Seriously. (This should be easier once I'm no longer trying to stretch out my meds, which makes me tired as fuck for four or five days out of the week.)
3. Stop wasting so much time in front of the goddamn computer without posting anything. Either do something USEFUL on the computer, or go do something else. For christ's sake, self, how many games of spider solitaire can you play in one afternoon? Am I going to have to take another stab at "no computer before dinner"?
To be fair, this is my last weekend of Fucking Around Without Doing Anything until... probably after Barricade Day. Next week is the Montreuil-sur-Mer trip, week after that I might have friends visiting, second week of April my mom will be in Paris, then spring break, then I might go to Edinburgh at the beginning of May, then exams, then Wave Gotik Treffen, then Barricade Day. So if I'm going to be useless and unable to concentrate on anything for the better part of a week, this week is as good as any.
Also, while lazing around I've at least been reading. Thérèse Philosophe (which is fabulous!), Les Mystères de Paris (am on page 1000 of 1300), and Le Dernier jour d'un condamné. Close to finishing all three. Thérèse is my bedroom read (not like that!--well, okay, a little) and will probably be replaced by something by Mary Renault or at least Not Nineteenth Century; Mystères de Paris is my endless feuilleton and will probably be replaced by Balzac (Père Goriot, the half of Illusions Perdues I haven't read, and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes); Dernier Jour is what I carry around in my purse, and god knows what I'll replace it with. Would love to read Fragoletta if I could find a copy that wasn't exorbitantly expensive, but... yeah. Maybe The Well of Loneliness.
I feel like I should eventually make a giant post on Mystères de Paris, because it is basically the novel most people would expect to read when picking up a book called Les Misérables. It's Dickensian in its length and profusion of minor characters and complicated subplots; it's very much a social novel about the Parisian underclass and the injustice of mid-19th-century society. It's, basically, what's missing from Les Mis--dark gritty moralistic stories about the misery of the dangerous classes. It makes me want to reread LM, because Hugo is very, very obviously riffing off of Eugène Sue, taking the same subject matter and making a sprawling Romantic novel out of it. I wouldn't go so far as to say that Les Mis is fanfiction of Mystères de Paris with the characters renamed and shuffled around, but there's something fanfiction-y about the transformative way Hugo takes the subject matter and uses it for a completely different purpose. And there are sneaky references all over the place, from the Rue Plumet to the expression "patron-minette."
Basically, while Les Mis is of course a classic novel and meant to stand on its own, Hugo probably expected his audience to have read Mystères de Paris. The understanding is that you've already read about how liberated convicts can't find work and are driven back to crime, and how kids who grow up in crapsack conditions are twisted by it, and what fate befalls abandoned women and children, so Hugo is free to make Romantic--even mythic--figures out of these people and wax eloquent about the future without belaboring the social details. Eugene Sue has already done that for him, so Hugo gets to play around with these concepts and characters and work them into his thoughts on