Portrait of Grad School as a Catholic Schoolgirl

I'm going to start completely off topic by addressing a commercial I just saw on USA. This commercial (for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest--which is to say, for the last good PotC) muses on the subject of the "fairest pirate of them all". It notes that Orlando Bloom has the hair (fair enough), that Johnny Depp has the makeup (affirmed by the shot of him in full cannibal-god facepaint), and that Keira Knightley has "the chest".

I adore Keira Knightley (now that there's a year or so of distance between me and the debacle that was At World's End), but nobody is attracted to her because she has boobs. Because she doesn't. The girl is in the same category as Natalie Portman. She's practically concave.

Don't take this to mean I have something against small breasts. I just think it's kind of ridiculous that Mademoiselle Knightley is being advertised as having something that she clearly does not.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled programming.

I spoke to my short story prof earlier today. I'd tried once before and failed miserably, and damn near missed her this evening. I caught her just as she was leaving, though, and we had what I think was a fairly productive talk. It basically came down to her apologizing for pressing the point so hard in class, that she was just trying to get me to branch out into different things. Which I can understand, but I also explained to her that writing fantasy and horror is when I have the most fun, and that I find literary fiction to be rather boring, in all honesty.

That led to kind of a strange place, wherein she compared my seeming inability to like literary fiction because of my fondness for high-energy and plot-centric genre material to her inability to like jazz because her musical realm of choice has always been rock. Which makes sense if you squint a little bit and try not to think too hard.

Then things returned to normalcy, and she pointed out that everyone has a tendency to teach to their strengths, and that perhaps she doesn't know enough about the fantasy genre to really help. When she asked for a recommendation for a short story collection, I said I'd bring around Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman and a couple old issues of Fantasy and Science Fiction for her reading pleasure. She seemed to take well to that.

Anyway, the main thing she told me was to not worry about the thesis, that what I write will work for it. Or that they'll make it work, or whatever. The main thing was that I would be able to construct my thesis out of the sort of stuff I like to write. So I suppose I'll hang about for a while and see how things go.

----
"So I figure I'll dally with graduate school for a while longer, make out a bit, see if I can get her to take her knickers off, and if she won't...I'll go find something else to do."
"An easier girl, you mean."
"Yes."
"Men. You're all alike."
"Hey, y'know, sometimes the penis just asserts itself."