Fast Becoming My Mascot...

I thought I only had a bad case of "senioritis" when this was on my wallpaper last spring, but this is essentially the way I feel about starting at Ann Arbor next week. Probably a bad harbinger....Can you be tired of life at 22?

I'm Going to Imitate Emily...

And make a poll. Because fear of grad school starting next week is petrifying my creativity.

Who Am I Most Like?

1. Bertha Rochester (Jane Eyre)
2. Honoria Glossop (P.G. Woodhouse)
3. Juno
4. Beatrice (As You Like It)
5. Lady Macbeth (Macbeth)
6. Emma (Emma)
7. Mary (Pride and Prejudice)
8. Isabel (Portrait of a Lady)
9. Eve (Paradise Lost)
10. Do I have a problem with positive role models?

We're branded...

What all the political newspapers couldn't do to us, the New Yorker and the Daily Show did. People have now heard of Patrick Henry College. I had dinner with the family I will be living with last night, and as soon as the dad, who is Unitarian, learned my alma mater he started drilling me: "What is evangelicism? What is Zionism? Didn't you all go wild when you got away from your parents?" I've found that people are more curious, albeit defensively curious, than hostile. If I answer their questions civilly, they stop looking like I'm going to zap them with a cross.

Why Brianna Is a Stoic

Redheaded Women Have a Unique Ability

Blondes may have more fun, but redheaded women have a special quality that is as unique as their hair color. They have an innate ability to tolerate more pain than other people.
In studies on "redhead" mice, which actually have blonde fur but carry a similar gene to the one that causes red hair in humans, scientists from the Human Genetics Unit in Edinburgh, Scotland were able to target the pain-reducing mechanism. These red-haired mice have a similar ability as human female redheads to withstand higher pain thresholds compared with other mice and require less anesthetic to block out certain kinds of pain.
This Scottish study was a follow-up to research conducted at McGill University in Montreal several years ago. While testing the painkilling drug pentazocine, the McGill researchers discovered that the same gene that gives women red hair and fair skin also plays a role in the body's natural pain suppression system. However, it doesn't work for male carrot-tops. Redheaded women can tolerate more pain than anyone else, including men with red hair and men and women who do not have red hair. The others all had a similar and much lower tolerance to pain than flame-haired females.
"While we believe pain is the same in all women of all hair colors, our study shows women with red hair respond better to the painkilling drug we tested than anyone else--including men," lead researcher Jeffrey S. Mogil, a professor of pain studies at McGill, said in a news release.
Why would the gene that gives red hair and fair skin--identified as Mc1r--work differently in redheaded men and women? Mogil told Reuters that men and women are using different pain pathways. "If they were using the same pathways, then the redhead gene would have the same impact for both sexes," he added.
When we experience pain, our bodies attempt to dull the discomfort by releasing natural substances that are similar to medications like morphine. The gene Mc1r influences the pathway through which the body doles out those naturally occurring painkillers in women. It appears that in most people, the Mc1r gene produces a protein that reduces the ability of opioid drugs to block pain; however, in redheaded women, who have a non-functional version of the gene, such painkillers are free to work unhindered.
The goal of this ongoing research is to determine if there is a natural mechanism at work in redheads that can be adapted to help develop new painkillers and anesthetics for the rest of us.

Angsty Lyrics...

i couldn't let brianna's happy lyrics create a bubbly imbalance in cyberspace, so here, to balance out "what a wonderful world...."

save me

well i got a candle
and i've got a spoon
i live in a hallway
with no doors
and no rooms
under a window seat
they all were found
a touch of concrete
within the doorway
without a sound
someone save me if you will
and take away all these pills
and please just save me if you can
from my blasphemy in my wasteland

how did i get here
and what went wrong
couldn't handle forgiveness
now i'm far beyond gone
and i can hardly remember
the look of my own eyes
how could i love this
a life so dishonest
it made me compromise
someone save me if you will
and take away all these pills
and please just save me if you can
from my blasphemy in my wasteland

jump in the water
jump in with me
jump on the altar
lay down with me
my heart is questioned
the answer is why

someone save me if you will
and take away all these pills
and please just save me if you can
from my blasphemy in my wasteland
someone save me
someone save me
somebody save me
somebody save me
please don't erase me

--Shinedown

Ann Has a Blog!!!

After many weeks of haranguing by her sadly deprived and waffish friends, the good Queen Mum has condescended to soil her lily-white hands with the democratic loam in order to sculpt a truly superior and uppity blog--despite the fact that she has a life. I promise it will be scintillating and biting, but I will not vouch for its wholesomeness or sincerity.

Do visit! aelitten.blogspot.com.

Good News, Bad News

Good news. (In response to Brianna's question below). I've found a liveable living situation up at University of Michigan. At first I was feeling all progressive and independent, and looking at rooms in co-ed apartments. That soon stopped. One situation was a one-bedroom apartment I would be sharing with two foreign guys. Not a huge problem, except they would be setting up camp in the living room! The other place I looked at was one of those old, run-down college houses with six other people. There was no parking, the house smelled like the four cats that lived there, and my room was a cement block cell in an unfinished basement--cost $300 plus utilities.

I was desperate when I got to the last place. Lucretia was a mother studying opera whose husband was going to Seattle to study law, so she was offering me reduced rent in return for watching her little boy. The apartment is in the campus family housing. It is predictably drab on the outside, but it is much quieter, cleaner, and roomier than the other places I looked. I have a room with a window looking out on the communal garden and hardwood floors. There is a basement as well as a living room, my own parking spot, laundry privileges, and hi-speed wireless internet. What else could a girl want? My grandparents are giving me furniture. I will transplant my aloe, peppermint and oregano into pots, frame my prints from the Getty, buy a rag rug, and everything will be perfect! Right? I will probably take the bus (free to students) down to Central Campus, which is beautiful but a parking nightmare.

Ann Arbor is really a great town--lots of diversity, health food stores, museums, and ethnic restaurants. It's almost like being on the East Coast again. People should come visit me.

The bad news is that my little cousin, Mikey, from Wisconsin, was killed by a train today. He never developed a sense of danger--he was fishing off a railroad bridge with two friends when the train came. They ran away, but he forgot his pole and went back for it. The train knocked him off the bridge and, probably unconscious, he was beyond saving when they recovered him 30 minutes later. We weren't close, but I feel bad for my dad's family right now. My grandma is also dying of lung cancer.

Gothic Cathedrals

Broken Wings

No, the title is not referring to some sappy, solipsistic, melodramatic misconception of my psyche. It is the title of an Israeli movie I just watched. Note that I said Israeli and not Jewish. Because this movie was about barrenness and nihilism--it had angst, man. It was intensely post-modern (I wish we had a more meaningful term for our current global culture) with a heart-breaking vacuum in place of God. The dysfunctional family is just like an American dysfunctional family except poorer and even more bleakly aware of their emptiness.

Perhaps the practicing Jewish families in Israel are truly "reclaiming the Promised Land," but the inhabitants in this movie, at least, seemed to only to be a Mediterranian transplant of the failing western values.

Advice for Bloggers from Strunk and White

9. Do not affect a breezy manner

The volume of writing is enormous, these days, and much of it has a sort of windiness about it, almost as though the author were in a state of euphoria. "Spontaneous me," sang Whitman, and, in his innocence, let loose the hordes of uninspired scribblers who would one day confuse spontaneity with genius.

The breezy style is often the work of an egocentric, the person who imagines that everything that pops into his head is of general interest and that uninhibited prose creates high spirits and carries the day....

Point taken, Mr. White. I am duly chastened and tempted to never blog another breezy, uninspired word.

An Interesting Post...

Emily told me to post something interesting to amuse her. If I weren't busy watching "Ministry of Fear" I would post a study (yet to be conducted) about the meaning of "believe" in the New Testament. Instead I will post a random picture of the gardens at Versailles.

The Colosseum

Actually a huge tourist trap that we almost skipped (tour guides and squat gladiators assaulted one at the entrance), but in the end we decided we couldn't leave Rome without going in, especially since the ticket was also good for the Palatine Hill.

The Power of the Tongue

"Women can resist a man's love, a man's fame, a man's personal appearance, and a man's money, but they cannot resist a man's tongue when he knows how to talk to them."
----Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

Why Hiking in Swizterland Is My Favorite Thing

This is the small, peaceful village we hiked to from Interlaken. No, the waterfall isn't photoshoped.