raks sharqi...

i love belly dance... i know, it has only been one lesson, but it is so much fun!!!! and i am not as sore as i thought i would be... it is really hard, lots more so than i expected, but soooooo much fun... i can't wait till i am good... g-fresh and i are going to practice every night...

i only wish i was as good as this girl is...

mass media...

so, as descriptions of mass media, i find this one to be very entertaining... and somewhat true...

there is a ton of information, much of it i don't care about, on the internet - just as i imagine the drunk librarian in the corner at the cocktail party... and like the librarian, once one gets it started, it sucks you in with information to places you never wanted to go... like facebook, myspace and random forums that suck the soul from the ideas they may have been founded on... and occasionally you get a gem - a well-edited wiki, an educational website, friends blogs - but more often you lose hours of you life that you can never get back... and i love it...

i must be perverse, because i would rather talk to the drunk librarian in the corner than most of the other people at the party... the internet is where i get my news, talk to friends, organize my life... and i really love the random places that the drunk librarian leads me... beautiful, brilliant, fun places... even though there are some places that you can not un-know, no matter how much you may wish to - like some of the places you can find kittens...

still, it beats the hell out of "fair and balanced"...

culture, in brief...

i have discovered a lovely new(to me) site that will inspire horror in those of a serious literary persuasion, possible confusion in the rest of the population, and general hilarity all around...

please go visit Book-A-Minute Classics and see for yourself - they are truly brilliant...

my favorite so far is this one, of The Odyssey ...

i posted a general update on the status of my holiday break on flock hall 2.0, so if you are interested go there to read it...

i have to say that i am not a fan of new year's resolutions - in my experience no one follows them anyway - but there are a few things in my life that look like resolutions...

~ i have set up a fairly rigorous (by fleur standards) work-out schedule with my sister - both gym time and belly dancing and pilates classes
~ my roommate's vegan lifestyle is spilling over into my eating habits - i think about them more than i have in the past, anyway
~ my master's program reading list is going to force me to read some of the things that have been in the to-be-read pile since before i started college
~ the massive amounts of reading which i have to do this semester will require a schedule to keep on track - more planning than i have ever really done for homework before this year - grad school is much different from undergrad
~ tighter-than-planned money situation will require better budgeting skills and more fiscal responsibility

you can probably see how these items have the flavor of resolutions, but i prefer to see them as life changes not dependent on a date cycle to come into effect (besides that, i am listing them a couple weeks after the new year- where did the break go?) - and also they will hopefully have a longer life span than mid-february, unlike the average new year's resolution...