A Girl With a Sword

a running start

Some bar/karaoke machine/band down the street is playing "I Will Survive." I'm back in Columbia where my apartment is serenaded at all hours of the night. School starts on Thursday, and even though I'm going to a class that day I'm not sure if it's a class I'll stick with because this is going to be a busy semester for me. Gotta write a thesis, and apply for PhD programs, and oh yeah, regular classes, and work. Man. I'm tired already. Of course, that might be partly because I was in Chattanooga this weekend and when I'm there I just don't sleep.

It was a good weekend, Waffle House trips, going to McKay, crying over the loss of Greyfriar's soul (but not much because I've never really been a fan) (it was just sold to a big restaurant company, can't remember the name . . .). We went to see Stardust (I saw it twice last week, pretty good, reminiscent of Willow, but it doesn't really need comparisons, I mean, Robert DeNiro is a sky pirate and Clare Danes is a star!). Afterwards we were all standing around outside the Bijou and some drunken frat kids went by. I guess one of them had just done a cartwheel in the street. His friend was saying "Do another one, do it one handed, right here in front of the hippies." Yeah, we have achieved hippie status. I think to frat kids, though, that just means we look kind of dirty and scruffy.

I got to go with Natalie on her photo shoot for the Pulse. She was shooting some local artists and it was fun to just blend into the background while she discussed art with them in her melding of art and philosophy and life kind of way. She also wrote some stuff for the Pulse on them, which is way exciting.

I love that everyone's kind of settling into real Chattanooga life, Covenant is fading into the background, and it's a nice background, and it's nice to keep in touch with the place. I was up there on Friday for lunch with Natalie and Aaron in the grounds shed and all the little freshman were moving in. The new dorm is . . . well, built. It looks kind of boring, though, I hope they're going to do something with the outside. I wonder if I would know about that if I read those "BUILD" project things they keep mailing me? But Covenant aside, I love everyone living in St. Elmo these days (I mean that everyone is living in St. Elmo. How can I love everyone in St. Elmo, I don't even know everyone in St. Elmo), makes it easy to walk all over, like Blockbuster and Bi-Lo and Mojo and Mr. T's. It's way different from my college days when I could only get to those places by begging a ride from some friend-of-a-friend with a car.

But now I'm back in Columbia, stopped by Augusta last night, stayed with Hope. We watched Tristram Shandy, which was amazing. It's a movie about a movie. The idea is, Tristram Shandy is an unfilmable book, and this is a movie about people trying to film it. It's self-aware to an embarrassing extent, with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon actually playing themselves, or characters meant to represent them. Some parts are actually the film within the film, also very self-awarely narrated by Tristram Shandy as seen here:

Tristram Shandy: That is a child actor, pretending to be me. I'll be able to play myself later. I think I could probably get away with being eighteen, nineteen. Until then, I'll be played by a series of child actors. This was the best of a bad bunch.

You fans of The (British) Office and Slings and Arrows need to get on this.