I think, therefore I am

I've finished one of my finals, in the form of a paper that I handed in yesterday. That's one down and four to go.

Homework and general preparation.
Core Course: Read selections given, read extra four pages that will get sent to you, write a little essay about Heldenplatz..

Textanalyse: Just. Know everything. All of it forever. (For those in the know, this is the class that yielded one of my new favorite German words 'fünfhebig', or pentametrical.)

Tibetology: Read some, be able to talk about it in class with the professor.

Hand-scripts: ask professor if I can take the test early, as I will be flying out on the day that it's currently assigned.

Another reason that French bewilders me: I recently discovered that in French possessive pronouns, the pronoun takes the grammatical gender of the object, not the gender of the owner. I offer a list of comparisons from other languages to clarify my point.

Note: the object 'boyfriend' here was chosen because it's one of those few nouns in English that's understood to have a non-neutral grammatical gender; to whit, a 'boyfriend' is not an 'it.' Since I am working in four languages here, I wanted something that would have the same grammatical gender in all examples.

Compare:
English. That is her boyfriend.

The possessive pronoun, though applied here to noun with a masculine grammatical and physical gender, reflects the gender of the person doing the owning.

German Das ist ihr Freund.

The possessive pronoun ihr reflects the female gender of the owner. The adjective ending (which is here actually indicated via omission, because 'der Freund' is in the nominative case and adjectives modifying grammatically male nouns don't take an ending in the nominative) reflects the grammatically male gender of 'Freund' (a male friend, boyfriend).

Spanish Ese es su novio.
Related construction: Es el novio suyo.

The possessive pronoun su is itself gender neutral, but varies with the grammatical number of the noun it modifies (this function is not really shown here). This sentence could read either 'That is her boyfriend' or 'That is his boyfriend.' The related construction 'Es el novio suyo', translated 'He is the boyfriend of hers/his' displays the related possessive construction varies based on the grammatical gender (and number, though this is not here displayed) of the object of ownership.

French C'est son petit ami.

The possessive pronoun here son can be translated as 'his' or 'her', and corresponds to the grammatical gender of the object it modifies, masculine 'ami.'

In conclusion: Romance languages are incredibly fucking weird. They care more about the grammatical gender of the object than of the person doing the owning. Spanish being gender-neutral with su was easy enough to learn, but there is no way I would be able to wrap my mind around using a possessive pronoun that did not specify the gender of the owner but made a big deal of specifying the object's gender.

In spite of this, I find I actually kind of want to learn French.

(no subject)

		I will marry Toby.
		After a wild honeymoon, We will settle down in Berlin in our fabulous Shack.
		We will have 6 kid(s) together.
		Our family will zoom around in a blood red helicopter.
		I will spend my days as a novelist, and live happily ever after.

Review: Love and Other Disasters

I will admit that I picked up this movie because I know Brittany Murphy and I have a slight crush on her Audrey-Hepburnish dark looks.

Love and Other Disasters seems very much the work of a young screenwriter who took "write what you know" a little too much to heart. The movie divides its time between Jacks the main character and her gay roomie Peter, who breaks the fourth wall to write the screenplay that we see turned into the movie we see before us. Only, not exactly, because the final showing of the film sticks Gweneth Paltrow and Orlando Bloom into the main character's roles and shoehorns a simple happy ending onto it.

The movie is not as clever as it wants to be: the main characters constantly refer to movie stereotypes, particularly to hang lampshades on how different they are from those poorly thought out characters, or how little they want to be like one of them in real life. It's a nice conceit, actually, but the film is just not quite smart enough to pull it off. It's got some lovely moments and great little lines, but it seems like there's a little much stuck into one film. Although that seems to make it's own point even better: it's not trying to be a romantic comedy, it's trying to be a film about the life of someone who happens to spend too much time thinking about how to write a romantic comedy. It gets a little distracted from its own existentialism and exploration of truth. The tricky bit is, while trying to get a "real life is not a movie" message into the plot, the movie still has to be a movie. It's got to walk a very thin line between too much lampshade hanging about how different they are from a movie, and actually being a movie that people want to watch. It's an ambitious move overall and I would advise against judging them too harshly for it.

I think it's probably an under appreciated little flick overall. There are some genuinely novel comic moments, even the minor characters are well fleshed out, and it hits rather sweet tone at the end by looking at the real happy endings in the characters' lives versus the constructed ones that the author could have forced them into.

Criticism: Brittany Murphy is simply naked a lot in this film. There are sometimes reasons, but mostly, it seems like they just wrote her as a character very comfortable with her own body and the camera *wink wink nudge nudge* just happened to be there. In moments of candid humor, it works. But I simply cannot buy the scene in which she beds down for the night in an underwire bra. She was shown moments before in thin and comfy T-shirt, which would be much nicer to sleep in- the sexy lingerie seems thrown in and out of character, and I can vouch for it as something that would simply be wildly uncomfortable at any level of intoxication. Yes, the boy has to be turned on by her, but they could just have had her naked under the covers and that would have served just as well.