ne(one)piphany

Kyle tagged me on this meme ages ago, but I never noticed because he sneakily named me after the fact. Which should teach me about leaving snarky comments. Or something.

Four jobs I’ve had:

1. Graphic designer
2. Computer helpdesk
3. Library assistant
4. Cram school tutor

Four movies I can watch over and over:

1. Next Stop Wonderland
2. Shall We Dance?
3. Whisper of the Heart
4. Koyaanisqatsi

Four places I’ve lived:

1. Cambridge, Massachusetts
2. Aurora, Illinois
3. Lisle, Illinois
4. Seattle, Washington

Four TV shows I love:

1. Battlestar Galactica
2. Sports Night
3. His & Her Circumstances
4. Arrested Development

Four places I’ve vacationed:

1. Cairo, Egypt
2. Maui, Hawai’i
3. Edinburgh, Scotland
4. Seoul, South Korea

Four of my favorite dishes:

1. Tojo’s smoked sablefish soup
2. Ikuradon, mmm!
3. Sticky toffee pudding
4. Spaghetti alla carbonara

Four sites I visit daily:

1. Bloglines
…and If it isn’t something I can read in Bloglines, I always forget to keep up.

Four places I would rather be right now:

1-4. With you, you, you and you.

Four bloggers I am tagging:

Everyone and her mother has already done this meme, so if you haven’t and are reading this… tag!

Turner Classic Movies is ringing in the new year with a Miyazaki retrospective — Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke this Thursday, followed by Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Castle in the Sky, My Neighbor Totoro, Porco Rosso, Whisper of the Heart. Of course, I love every last one of these films, but I wanted to call out the last two — they’re not as well known, but they’re definitely two of my favorites. Also on the slate for January are Takahata’s Only Yesterday and Pom Poko.

Just got Howl’s Moving Castle on disc in Vancouver, too, so this should be a full month of animated goodness. Mmm!

Speaking of goodness, I’m about to do some kitchen experimentation: grilled cheese sandwiches made with Beecher’s Flagship, maybe a splash of white truffle oil. We’ll see how it goes.

Rain and wind on the New Year. I keep smelling phantom wood fires, cinnamon, caramel, cloves — probably memories of the recent spice rack reorganziation. I could make those smells real with a little bit of holiday baking, but I’d rather be huddled here, warm in PJs, blankets on the floor. Spending enough effort practicing, writing “2007” in my new moleskine.

I know I should be out attacking the year afresh, but the year can stand to start tomorrow.

Happy happy, everyone!

Finally, thanks to sugs for passing along a list that must have been compiled just for me:

• “games I would buy or I already own just because they look good!”

Lots of pretty, pretty fun there to dive into.

Battlestar Galactica? Time Magazine just named it the #1 television series of 2005, and it so is, it really is. Was a little late coming to it, but holiday goodness combined with a lot of free time has meant hours and hours of catch-up marathoning. Tired eyes, but happy happy — after all, new episodes start this Friday!

(wow, is that Philip Glass I just heard in this episode?)

Update: ooops, that’s next Friday. More waiting, I guess.

Spending sixteen hour days at work isn’t boding well for the start of NaNoWriMo, but I’ll try to have some amusing story tidbits to post at least some of the time. Thank you all for your story suggestions so far (and please continue to add more, as I’ll be checking back on that thread for the rest of the month). On the bright side, things should ease down on that front after this weekend, so I should have at least three weeks of moderately open time.

In the meantime I’m looking forward to taking a peek at what y’all are writing (yes, I’m looking at you!). You are going to share, right? Save me from work!

TCM has been showing a really thorough Hitchcock retrospective over the last few weeks, and I’ve been recorded a fair chunk of it. So far, I’ve rewatched Shadow of a Doubt (with a nice making-of documentary — so good!) and seen Suspicion for the first time (ugh — Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine in this stinker? Hard to believe, but there you go) On tap: The Trouble with Harry, To Catch a Thief, The Lady Vanishes…

In other news, Universal’s finally re-released Vertigo and Psycho in remastered widescreen, but the only way to get them is in an expensive (but otherwise tasty-looking) 14-disc box set. Wah.

Happy Halloween, everyone! What’d you dress up as?

Signs of going mad: watched the entirety of Firefly on Saturday, followed by Serenity this afternoon, an ordeal both tiring and fun. Spent the rest of the day singing the theme song with all sorts of made up words, since I’d forgotten what they were supposed to be, but I’m glad it was that instead of the crazy-making singing octopus snack bar song. Anyone have an MP3 of the theme? I think I probably just need to hear it once with the right words to get it out of my head.

I am wondering how a future world seemingly dominated by Chinese & Asiatic culture and language can have so few Asians walking around, or in fact, anyone between white & black on the racial spectrum — aside from Inara and the ladies of the Heart of Gold, whatever that’s supposed to mean.

Still! It was fun, and so very, very quotable. But I do rather feel like I never want to watch television again.

This is so so wrong.

Nothing drains my blogging momentum like having to deal with comment spam, and there’s just been an absolute deluge lately, as spammers seem to have found ways to circumvent SpamLookup’s junk filter. Thankfully, most of them are still getting moderated due to the URL limit, but it’s still getting old — I’ve probably had to delete five hundred or so in the last four days.

I’m holding out hope for a near-term solution from Six Apart or somebody. Anybody! I love getting comments, but beyond a certain point it can’t be worth it.

And also, I need reasons to like blogging again, or I end up doing things like watching America’s Next Top Model.

Which helps nobody at all. Seriously.

Anyone else get their NaNoWriMo kickoff mail? Lord help me, I think I’m actually going to try again this year.

And finally: digital SLRs. Canon or Nikon? Help!

Experimenting with Movable Type’s dynamic publishing mode. Monthly archives are now generated on-the-fly, and I can also join all the cool kids and keep tag-based archives without bogging down rebuilding. Now all I have to do is go back and tag all my old entries! I’d meant to do individual entry pages too, but so far I’m in love with too many plugins that won’t work under PHP.

Incidentally, commenting should now be somewhat faster.

In media news:

Criterion has just announced they’ll release two all-time greats on DVD: Ran and Ugetsu. The Mizoguchi is a real gem — supernatural, mysterious, and intensely sad, I haven’t seen it in years and yet it’s haunted me in some way or another ever since.

Have actually been enjoying (non-Katrina-related) television recently: Slings and Arrows on Sundance, very Canadian, really good (and lord knows I have a thing for Paul Gross); Rome on HBO is right up my historical alley, and I’m also enjoying the slew of tie-in documentaries on History Channel; Transgeneration will be airing on Sundance starting September 20.

Books keep rolling in from the library, god bless: Kare Kano in English (it is my blog namesake, after all), Spring Snow, The Time Traveler’s Wife, Never Let Me Go. Clearly something has gone terribly wrong and I’ve had to put a freeze on my holds, as I despair of finishing these all in time…

Dug this one out of the archives, where that expanse of white shirt-back kept getting in the way of any appreciation I could muster. I’m still not sure it works, but there’s just something — in her glance, or the dance reflected in hazy shadow on the spatter shield…

This was taken at Pommes Frites in Manhattan, the best place ever.

I said this in comments, but I watched the rest of the BBC Jane Eyre last night. Still so good, but St. John Rivers? Total freak!

Piling up for an Austen marathon: should I rent the BBC Northanger Abbey? Anyone seen it?

Currently in the pile:

• Clueless
• Pride & Prejudice (1995, BBC)
• Persuasion (1995, BBC)
• Sense & Sensibility (1995, Sony)
• Emma (1996, BBC/ITV)
• Mansfield Park (1999, Miramax)
• Bridget Jones’ Diary
• Bride & Prejudice

Finally, I just discovered AustenBlog today and have spent far too much time reading it — and through it found the trailer for Focus Features’ new Pride & Prejudice. Matthew McFadyen? Keira Knightley? Sign me up, please!

And, back to Brontë: SB says I must see the 1944 Jane Eyre with Orson Welles, but it doesn’t seem to be available on disc. Sigh…

I dreamt of tall grass and flames; standing on the ridge with a hole in my arm and my heart, all I could do was watch and cry. But we can wait, and hope.

Am slowly reliving old television miniseries of my childhood — already wrote about 1982’s The Scarlet Pimpernel with Jane Seymour and Anthony Andrews, and last night started re-watching the 1983 BBC Jane Eyre with Timothy Dalton and Zelah Clarke, just released on disc, which I remember with untold amounts of affection (though perhaps I should cut out the “re-,” since at 311 minutes and uncut, it’s quite a bit longer than the one I saw on videocassette back in middle school).

Jane Eyre is one of my all-time favorite books, so I was happy to see that not only is this as good as I remember from my wide-eyed & romantic childhood, it’s actually better! Though Jane is not so plain, Blanche not so beautiful, and Rochester far too dashing*, it still all works; and really, the casting couldn’t be better, because after one gets over the physical incongruities, everything else — acting, dialogue, sets, chemistry — I swear, it was like I was a teenager again!

Hope to finish up tonight, or later this weekend, and maybe some sort of Austen marathon for dessert? Bonnets and bustles and waistcoats: oh! I’ll be intolerable and happy, to be sure.