Tomorrow Morning means Golden Globe Nominations

And I have no clue what's going on with that. For the past four years of my life, I have been on top of awards season, ready with my predictions, formulating my own upsets. What happened to me? I know nothing. I've seen a mere 7 films released this year.

1. District 9
2. 500 Days of Summer
3. Star Trek
4. Watchmen
5. Drag Me to Hell
6. Bruno
7. Me and Orson Welles

This semester -- no scratch that. This YEAR has been too damn busy. This winter break, I must catch up. Hopefully, I will also be able to make a Top 10. We will see.

Seems like we may have our first female Best Director in Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker). I will be previewing her work in the next couple of days too. Jason Reitman is 3 for 3 now with Up in the Air, starring a Best Actor-worthy George Clooney. Many great animated films this year as well -- The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Ponyo, Up!, The Princess and the Frog, Coraline, etc. And Mo'Nique may have a new epithet in a couple months -- "Academy Award winner Mo'Nique" -- thanks Lee Daniels's Precious.

Enough musings. For now, I must run to HEB to buy Sunkist in preparation for my apresentação português amanhã.

Sharks

From howstuffworks "How Sharks Work" article:

We do know that sharks are solitary animals, for the most part. They typically live and hunt by themselves, joining up with other sharks only in certain circumstances, such as mating. Some sharks will form schools on occasion, however. Researchers aren't really sure why this occurs because sharks don't really need protection from predators and they don't feed in schools. At this point, it's still unclear why sharks behave this way. In any case, the occurrence is very rare. Most of the time, sharks swim alone.

December is the Ultimate

Ultimate, not meaning the greatest but the last.

The last of many, many things. It's the ultimate month of this decade. It's the ultimate day of school (excluding finals of course). It's the ultimate minute that I will get to see some great professors.

We just had a sending off for Dr. Charles Rossman, Joyce Scholar and UT English Professor. Great, great guy - super enthusiastic about Joyce, embracing of his students, and obviously loved by his family: two kids, one who graduated from Law school, the other with an MD, both of whom traveled from Houston to sit it on his ultimate day of teaching, documenting with a cute little point-and-shoot the ultimate hour that he will share with young minds the wealth of knowledge and the years of research he possesses on Joyce. And this woman, who I mistook for someone simply wanting to return to college for reasons that I presumed to be a desire to increase her literary knowledge -- well, it turns out that this is his wife. She sat through the entire class and read through Ulysses for the second time in her life just so that she can spend with him his ultimate semester as a Joyce Scholar at the University of Texas.

This is me being sentimental and slightly envious. Envious because - well, have you seen those movies? Wonder Boys, The Squid and the Whale? I wonder if student-professor relations actually blossom the way they do in these films. Not exactly the way they unfold in these films, of course. But I mean, do they bloom? Do students (particularly undergraduates) actually form long-term real relationships with their professors?

Anyways, this is one reason why I'm really glad I'm graduating with a liberal degree here at UT. How can a student really relate to a professor on things like marketing strategies? Or multi-variable calculus? Or fluorescent microscopy? Or MATLAB (say what!?)? I don't think a student can. Beautiful humanities.

I'm feeling quite sentimental right now. It's December. It's snowing like mad in Houston. Biting, cold wind here in Austin with all 750,000 residents hoping and wishing for but one snowflake. One little snowflake. I woke up at 5:00 a.m. before the sun rose and listened to The National. It's the ultimate day of the preantepenultimate semester of my penultimate year of college. And this is me documenting this morning. If I'm this sentimental now, I wonder what the ultimate day of the ultimate semester of my ultimate year here will be for me. Guess, we'll have to see.

Ultimately, I want to say that I'm very sorry that you all will not be able to take Professor Rossman's James Joyce course. My apologies indeed.

And as one ultimate reminder for all those who may stumble upon this entry:
Remember, Madam, I never eat muscatel grapes.

This is Just to Say

That this time of year, I'm usually prognosticating the Oscars. Sadly, my life has grown far too hectic for this kind of fun - or any general sort of fun actually.

Maybe I'll watch a few films during Thanksgiving break?

To name a few in which I find interest:

An Education, Precious, The Hurt Locker, Up (how could I have missed a Pixar?!), 500 Days of Summer, FANTASTIC MR. FOX (released wide on the 25th and receiving very positive early reviews), etc.

The Cause of My Insufferable Headache

Is it

• Not eating enough?
• Insufficient amount of sleep?
• James Joyces's difficult prose?
• Perpetual process of writing+waiting?
• Overload on school work?
  
• The necessity for days with 28+ hours?
• All of the above?

Too many variables to test out. Scientific method will not work for this experiment. What's that? Minus ten? Scales lie. Gravity lies. Newton lies. Time to warm up a boca burger. Scratch that first bullet off my list.

What November Means

Write. Apply. Write. Apply. Deadline. Wait. Wait. Wait.

Come on Baby, Light My Fire

Slowly burning away, I am the animate equivalent of this candle. (Just to clarify, I did not employ a dangling modifier -- slowly burning away modifies the noun I for I am burning away. Shame on you if you assumed it should modify candle).

All I want for Columbus Day (United States of America), Thanksgiving (Canada), o Dia Mundial da Criança (Brasil) is a staycation.

Just read: "Feefawfum. I zmellz de bloodz odz an Iridzman." - James Joyce, Ulysses ("Proteus")

twitter.com/edmarc

The stream-of-conscious of an underworked work-a-holic. Surrealism at its finest. You So Real mixtape. Download it. I compiled it. Tell me what you think. Que piensas? Que vocês acham? Was denkst du? Mixtape. Compilation. Fitter, happier, more productive.

Sorry, did I say animate? I meant inanimate.