dance music

OK, I know it’s been forever since I’ve posted anything on here. A part of me feels like I should apologize, but the rest of me doesn’t; I’ve been really busy getting some very important things settled in my life, and setting wheels in motion for other things. And that means that I’ve been pushing my blog to the back burner.

But tonight, I really wanted to share something about my new exercise discovery. See, I recently rented the movie Strictly Ballroom to watch with my sister. I’ve always loved the scene where Scott and Fran are dancing cha-cha to Doris Day’s “Perhaps Perhaps Perhaps” behind the curtain while the competition is going on in front of the curtain. Well, when the movie was over and I took it out and went downstairs to my own room, I found myself almost involuntarily dancing cha-cha while I walked. It made me remember just how much I enjoy dancing. I’ve never particularly been a performer, especially when it comes to physical things, and that’s mostly what has intimidated me about dance. But I love music and have a natural feel for the rhythms, and dancing is just one more way to appreciate both.

So, I thought to myself, “Wouldn’t it be great if I could dance every day for my cardiovascular exercise?” And then I thought, “Surely someone must have made an exercise DVD like that.” So I looked it up online — and then I thought to myself, “Indeed they have! And don’t call me Shirley.” The only problem was, that I couldn’t afford to buy the DVD at the time; but the next I had an epiphany, and I found the DVDs I was interested in on Netflix! The first one came about a week ago, and I’ve used it for my daily exercise almost every day since then. And I love it!! It’s hosted by Lisa Rinna: Dance Body Beautiful, Disc 1 – Jive Jump Ballroom Bump. This particular DVD includes jive, cha-cha, salsa, and disco. I knew that I loved cha-cha already, but I was shocked by how much I love dancing disco! It’s a really simple dance, and I have so much fun rolling my hands and pointing my arm up in the air! It’s great.

Anyway, I wanted to ask for help. Today I took about a half-hour and pulled together a quick, short list of songs already on my computer that I can use to dance these dances. I had tons of appropriate jive music, and the cha-cha list is growing every time I listen to my music … but I still need some more songs for both cha-cha and disco. Any thoughts about songs I would be likely to own that would also be good for dancing cha-cha or disco?

I’m really wishing that I had “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor. Alas, alack.

 

frasier clips

So, I recently discovered that I can find almost every episode of Frasier on YouTube, and I’ve been completely obsessed with the show for the last few weeks.

I remember watching the show sometimes during high school, but it wasn’t until college that I really started to enjoy it.  One night, in particular, I saw the episode called “The Seal Who Came to Dinner” (from Season 6), and thinking to myself, “Gee, this show is hilarious! I ought to watch it more.”  I did watch it a bit more after that–but nowadays I just can’t get enough of it.  I love re-runs.

 

repenting

So, I’m repenting.

I have really slacked off during the past few months, especially since the Summer semester got over at BYU-I. It’s been like an extended vacation, but it turns out that I really don’t like it. It keeps me lazy and unproductive, and that just depresses me in the long-run.

But today I went running and then finished my other exercises (a few strength exercises for my back and ankles, as well as some push-ups and sit-ups, which are pretty pathetic at this point). And I feel great! I tend to forget just how wonderful I feel when I really work out, so I’m enjoying this feeling tonight. I did go running once last week, but it wasn’t very good, and I didn’t feel very motivated afterward to continue it. After this, though, I’m ready. I’ve adopted a new workout program, and I’m really excited for it–even though it’s going to require some really early rising, and that’s going to be rough for a while.

I also have been writing more regularly, and I find it very energizing. I have to admit that I’m deeply indebted to my good friends, who have all been very supportive of my desire to start writing for real–and especially to Ellie, who has helped me find all kinds of great hints and tips from writing magazines and such. The whole thing is really scary prospect for me and feels highly vulnerable, but I do love it as well.

In addition to these two steps, I have also started attending my singles branch again (they were starting to wonder whether I was still alive, even, after I’ve missed so many weeks there from illness or going out of town or visiting other wards), and I am also reviving my blog. I don’t have many readers, but they are important to me, and really you’re all the reason I even started this blog in the first place–so that I could keep my loved-ones posted about what’s going on in my life, even while I’m too far away to be able to talk regularly. So, starting today, you can expect at least two posts each week: one for Musical Monday and one for some miscellaneous discussion about my life.

(Oh yeah, and I’m totally obsessed with Betsy Brannon Green lately. She’s an LDS suspense author, and I just love her books. The suspense plots are decent–she’s no Agatha Christie, but she does keep you thinking about the mystery through the whole book–and the romance plot that inevitably weaves into the story is usually top-notch. Such a fun writer! I’m eagerly awaiting the second installment in her Duty series, which comes out this October.  Check out her website and her page at Deseret Book.)

 

me gusta queso

I’ve been watching a lot of TV today (shocking, eh?), and I just finished Psych on the USA Network. I just love that show — can’t stress that point enough! In fact, I’ve been getting a little kick recently out of having some fresh pineapple in the house (which, as Shawn maintains, is the king of fruits). Anyhow, tonight’s episode was great. It involved a telenovella (Spanish-language soap opera) in which Shawn acted for a few days while working on the case. At the beginning of the show, the theme song was in Spanish — classic! And at the end, Lassiter ended up on-screen, handcuffing the culprit, so he pulled out his junior-high Spanish:

Hola. … Me llamo Inspector Carlton Lassiter. … Me gusta queso.

That last line just cracked me up! You never know what you’re going to end up with when you have to rely on decades-old language training — which probably wasn’t very good in the first place.

 

Ioan movies

I’ve been Netflixing lots of Ioan Gruffudd movies lately, wanting to see his acting (and, admittedly, his face) in a variety of contexts.

Last week I watched him in a BBC/Masterpiece Theater production of Great Expectations, in which he played Pip. Now, as many of you know, this is my favorite Dickens book, so I was excited to see how Ioan did. From a purely objective standpoint *snicker* I thought he was quite good. I have to take issue with the writing, to an extent, although I wasn’t as upset by it as many of the online reviewers I’ve read. But I did think that Ioan did quite well in the role, with what he was given.

The next one I watched was Very Annie Mary, which is set in Wales — I was excited to hear Ioan speaking in a Welsh accent, and I was not disappointed, not in that respect. The movie wasn’t that great, overall. The writing was pretty silly and see-through. And people just kept doing stupid things. But Ioan played a gay shop-keeper, along with his best friend Matthew Rhys, and they were hilarious. Probably the best part of the whole movie is the scene where they are having singing lessons from Annie Mary, and they rehearse “You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun,” from Annie Get Your Gun. And ever since then, I keep getting lines stuck in my head in that great Welsh accent: “Ah, poo-r little Bethahn Bevahn” or “He eats twoo full sahndwiches with ehvery mee-al” or “You’re sittin’ on a gohld mine, lass.”

My next Netflix movie is The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill and Came Down a Mountain, with Hugh Grant. I’ve always liked that film, though I haven’t seen it for some time, and I’m curious to see how the accents stack up.

“As he pretended not to see me, I pretended not to see him.” (12 points)

The last quote was from Elizabeth Peters’s Amelia Peabody series.

 

go Shep!

I have been subscribing for over a month now to the “Fox News Flash” video podcast. They put out about three of them a day, hosted by different Fox News anchors, and they sum up in about a minute the stories that are making the rounds on Fox.

I especially enjoy those hosted by Shepard Smith.

This morning, I’ve been catching up on this week’s News Flashes, and Shep had a story about a coffee producer in Panama who is making a 750-gallon cup of coffee, in hopes of breaking the world record for the largest cup of coffee. When he was finished with the story, Shep looked straight into the camera and muttered, “That’s stupid.”

Thanks, Shep. Thanks for making my day just that much brighter.

Love has a most unfortunate effect on the brain. (62 points)

Today’s quote further explicates my feelings about Shep. The last quote was from Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” which I recently read for the fist time ever. Enjoyed it. But that’s a post for another day.

 

Caernarfon, Seattle, and Kansas

I am compeltely obsessed with Welsh. During the last few weeks I have checked out pretty much everything on the BBC Learn Welsh website, so I’ve learned a lot of the same things over and over again. I’ve finally found my favorite “course” (it’s called The Big Welsh Challenge), but they’ve only got 4 lessons up so far, and I’m more than ready to move on … but I expect it will be a while. So, in the meantime, I’ll keep playing with Colin & Cumberland and eavesdropping on the Lloyd family — my next favorite “courses.”

I have also decided two things that I want to do with my life.

First, I want to go to Wales and take a Welsh course there. I’ve decided Caernarfon sounds nice. It’s in the North-West, which has the highest percentage of Welsh-speakers in Wales, it’s next to the sea, and it’s got a nice, cheap little youth hostel. Oh, and a castle — those are always fun. I’ve been working on pronouncing the sentence “Dw i’n byw yng Nghaernarfon” — “I live in Caernarfon.” (It’s got this nasty nasal mutation, but I’m getting it worked out.)

Second, I’ve decided that I really want to be — not a college professor or even a stylistician — but a language-instruction assessor. You know, like a secret shopper, only for language instruction courses. I would go around and sit in on all these language classes and learn new languages and then assess the course and instructor(s). How fun would that be? It would give me a great excuse to move to Wales and take a Welsh course, not to mention courses in Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Egyptian heiroglyphs, Laotian, Maori, Czech … the list goes on and on. Now I just need to find someone who actually offers a job doing that kind of thing …

Meanwhile, it looks like I will be in Washington state for about two weeks this summer. I will be going out to help one of the linguistics professors here at UNT, who is starting her own business offering English-language-instruction summer vacation tours. This year they’ll be in Seattle and the Olympic Peninsula, and I’ll go along to provide more native English input for the Japanese and Chinese speakers and to offer some language instruction along the way. I’m pretty excited for it. It will be a paid position, I will get to see Washington, and I’ll have something pretty nifty to put on my resume and CV.

And, much closer to home, I’m going to Kansas next weekend to visit Margo. I am very excited for it. It’s the beginning of Spring Break out here, and Margo and I are planning to watch some movies (see today’s quote), hang out, sing a musical number for her singles branch, and shoot some guns. (Perhaps — I’m not sure what else we decided after the musical number, so I don’t remember whether or not guns ended up in the final plans.) After that, I’m flying out to Utah for the rest of the week to see my family. I’m planning to help my sister paint and take my Dad out to a movie for his birthday. Oddly enough, I love the painting, but taking Dad out is a Herculean task. I really want him to see Amazing Grace, though — I think he’d love it, and he needs to learn to spend time with his family.

A la batterie!! (101 points)

Oh yes, the last quote was from The Great Muppet Caper. I Netflixed it a while ago, and it’s still here — I love enough that I keep wanting to invite people over to watch it with me. Charles Grodin is wonderful in that movie. I’m always impressed with his ability to play passionate love scenes against a pig made of styrofoam.

 

Alfred and Welsh

Since Kimberly has resorted to begging, I decided I’d go ahead and post a new entry so everyone can see the source of the last quote. It was a toughie — I only know one person who would have gotten it, and she doesn’t read my blog — which is why I gave it such a high point-value. It was Elder David A. Bednar, during a BYU devotional entitled “Quick to Observe.”

I have taken a deep interest in King Alfred. After translating a short passage of his writings from Old English into Modern English last semester, I was deeply impressed with his personal morality. This semester, in a medieval literature class, we are reading several of the important sources on Alfred, both those written by him and those written about him by others. For tonight’s class, we’re supposed to write a character sketch of him, with references to the sources, and I just can’t help but be more and more impressed by him. He was a warrior, inventor, statesman, innovator, scholar, translator, philosopher, hunter, supporter of the arts — and above all, a deeply pious man. A true renaissance man if ever there was one, and he lived a good half-century before the Renaissance even took place. I will be very excited to meet him in the next life.

Another recent interest is the Welsh language. I’ve thought for years that Welsh would be fun to learn, and I really wanted to do so at BYU, but never managed to fit it into my schedule. The BBC has some Welsh language webpages, designed for teaching basic Welsh to both children and parents (and particularly to help parents keep up with their children, as there is a big Welsh-instruction movement on in the schools these days). They’ll do, but they’re certainly not the best language instruction activities. In the meantime, I did find a page on Omniglot all about Welsh pronunciation, which cleared up a lot of confusion I’d been having. Like the fact that Ioan Gruffudd’s name is not pronounced “grufud” or even “grufuth,” as I had been saying it, but “grifith” (with a voiced ‘th’ at the end) — in fact, Ioan Central has a sound clip of him saying his own name, which makes me wish that it was much easier to find clips of him speaking with his lovely Welsh accent. *sigh* The poor Welsh really get overlooked, you know.

So if you’ve a date in Constantinople, she’ll be waiting in Istanbul. (15 points)

 

Amazing Grace

Margo and I went to see the movie “Amazing Grace” yesterday. We went largely so we could see Ioan in period costume again (which was well worthwhile), and it turned out that Rufus Sewell was also in it (which made me all the happier, especially since he was one of the good guys). Personally, I thought it was … well, amazing. I very nearly cried about five times, I kept wanting to clap or cheer out loud in the theater, and when they showed the Scots Royal Dragoon Guards playing the song in front of Westminster Abbey at the end of the film, I just about bawled like a baby. The film was not quite what I had been expecting, and it wasn’t the best film I’ve ever seen, but it certainly was moving, at least to me. I told Margo I now want to name a son William Wilberforce. (Joking, joking … but I have planned on William for some time, so why not just throw in the Wilberforce while we’re at it?)

The film made me remember one of my own personal experiences with the song “Amazing Grace.” When I was living in Switzerland as a 14-year-old, we had mandatory choir classes, and one day when I was bored, I got looking through our choir book, just to see what else was there. “Amazing Grace” was in it (in English, should you be wondering), and so I took a few minutes to memorize some of the verses. I wasn’t particularly familiar with it at the time, but one verse in particular struck me at the time. It’s one of the few verses I actually know, although I never hear it sung, apparently since it wasn’t originally written by John Newton, but was added later by another author. I tried googling the verse yesterday, and didn’t find it online anywhere either — though I did find one brief allusion to it — so I wanted to post it here:

Shall Jesus bear the cross alone,
And all the world go free?
No, there’s a cross for everyone,
And there’s a cross for me.

Since yesterday, I have purchased about five different versions of the song from iTunes, partially in hopes of finding the same version that was used at the end of the film (no luck yet). Again, that’s just what I do.

The last quote was, indeed, from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (I think you spelled it right, Kimberly — at least I hope so, since I spelled it the same way). And, yes, that means that I’ve started re-reading them. Well, at least Book 6, that is. I’m not sure whether I’ll really have time for all of them before July — I know I don’t have time for the chapter-a-day strategy espoused by wahlee and susy_gwen. But I would at least like to re-read HBP. The other day, I got thinking about the profundity of Dumbledore’s remark, but from the reverse angle. That is, I was intrigued by the thought of how terrifying something is when we don’t have a name for it. So, we give it names — the Boogie-Man, the darkness, Satan, Nessie — and somehow things are easier to get hold of that way, easier to fend off from our rampant imaginations.

The issue was not the earrings. (125 points)

 

super geekin’ out!

Gosh, I can’t even explain how obsessed I’ve been this past week.

But I’ll try.

I’ve been reading more and more of the Amelia Peabody books that Kimberly has lent us. She did give me due warning that they get pretty intense. This past week I found myself entangled in the midst of a four-book “story arc,” as Kimberly calls them (I don’t know where she gets that term, but it works; I always wonder whether it’s something she picked up during her English degree, which would make sense, since I have not spent much time in the world of English academics). One night, I had been reading later than I should have, and as the clock neared and passed midnight, I decided I’d better stop soon — I would finish this section I was on and then go to bed. But then something immensely important happened. So of course I had to keep reading. And then in the next section something even more important happened. And so on, for the next several sections. I’m not just talking mild importance, either — I’m talking major revelations and conflicts and resolutions that turn into even bigger conflicts. So then it was close to 3 AM before I finally made myself put the book away and lie down to sleep.

But that’s only the beginning. The truly alarming thing is that it was another two hours or so before I was actually able to sleep. I was so thoroughly concerned about what was going on, and so completely at a loss as to how it would all resolve itself in the end, that I couldn’t manage to get my mind to stop whirling. Even when I managed to force it away from thinking about Amelia and her family, it then immediately turned to some similar problems, of an equally vexing and equally fictitious nature. The last time I looked at the clock, it was past 4 AM, and it took me quite a while after that to finally sleep. I had to force myself to stay in bed — to not camp out on the couch that night and read myself to sleep. Finally, I drowsed off, but even then I dreamt about Amelia. The odd thing about it was that I didn’t dream about it in movie style, where you see the things going on; rather, I dreamt about myself reading about the situation and its resolution.

The last time I remember being so distraught about a book was during my senior year of high school. (There have been plenty of other obsessions since then, notably a semester at Ricks College when I devoured the Anne of Green Gables books, but none of them had quite the same emotional impact on me.) At the time, I was reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and my mom and I had gone to Utah for some reason or other (quite possibly My Brother The Chiropractor’s graduation from BYU) and were staying with my aunt. I was sleeping on the couch, and as I was determined to finish that book if it killed me, I read for several hours before going to sleep. As I went, I kept getting more and more involved in one particular plot (the main one, concerning Dorothea Brooke Casaubon, her crusty and pedantic husband, and his nephew, Will Ladislaw). [Mild spoiler ahead, inviso-texted between the asterisks.] *** I started to think to myself, “If only that nasty Mr. Casaubon would die!! That would take care of everything!” And then, at the end of that very chapter, he did die!!! I felt like I had personally killed him. It was terrifying. And no, it didn’t solve everything (as one might have expected), so of course I had to continue on for another chapter or two. *** The chapters I read that night are among my favorites in the book, largely because my emotions were so highly involved in the development of the plot.

I’ve also become more and more interested in the ancient culture of the Middle East. I’ve long been interested in the languages (and thereby also the cultures) of the ancient civilizations of that region, and with the Amelia books being set in Egypt book after book after book, it’s hard to curb my desire to learn Middle Egyptian, anything written in cuneiform (Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian …), and even Arabic (though it is, of course, a much more modern language than the others).

In the midst of all this, I’m becoming increasinly annoyed with my program here. I feel very much as though I am ready to just strike out on my own and do my own research. I’m having a hard time deciding what I ought to do next in all of this — transfer somewhere else (like the U of Chicago) where I’d be doing less English and more Linguistics, get going on a dissertation by distance from Lancaster, or just stick it out here. Some of the projects I’m interested in will take much more time than I can give them in a semester, or even in a few semesters with coursework going on, and I’m not very interested in most of the classes I have to take. (Except, of course, for Old English and Historical Linguistics this fall!) If anyone has some helpful advice, or even not-so-helpful advice, I’d love to hear what you think.

In the meantime, here’s one of my favorite quotes from this week — On Sunday, the Bishop mentioned that he’d like to talk with me for a few minutes, but said he didn’t have time that day. Then he asked, “Will you be in town this week?” “Yep, all week,” I told him. To which he promptly replied, “I’m not.” Hmmm. That might present a slight problem, then.

Words are grown so false, I am loath to prove reason with them. (20 points)