Barack Obama just robo-called me.

I'm still voting for him, but this makes me really glad I don't have a real (=listed, landline) phone number. Likewise, I reliably vote for our (congressional) House rep, have met him multiple times, blather at him about every damned lefty issue in email, but every robo-call I ever got when I had a landline, I was like, Dave, Dude, DON'T FUCKING CALL ME WITH YOUR CREEPY RECORDED MESSAGE.

It's so weird for NC to be actually in play.

I know?! There were some Pennsylvania ladies on the NPR this morning who were all "I know the DNC says this needs to end, but nobody's ever given a shit about our vote before" and I so got that.

Oooh, good luck with the interview, Kat!

Even my roomba is being stupid today. Kept going to the same spot and getting stuck.

(Of course, there is the question of who truly was stupider: me or the machine? I should've blocked the spot off the first time it got stuck, not to mention the fourth...)

All I remember from 12th grade english was getting the hysterical giggles over As I Lay Dying in class. And then during the AP exam, I had to use it for an essay and I got the giggles AGAIN. Everyone in the room knew exactly why and THEY started laughing. After the test, they were all "So you wrote about AILD, huh?" It was bad. I don't even remember what passage exactly triggered the giggles.

I took electives for 12th grade English -- writing and speech.

Good luck, Kat!

Technology is making me cry.

I had British lit in eleventh grade, then AP English in twelfth. It wasn't until a few years later that I realized we hadn't read a single book by a female author during AP English. (At least, none that I could remember. We had a bunch of Greek stuff, then Shakespeare, then a mix of other stuff, but I couldn't remember anything written by a woman. Can't remember everything else we read -- some Hemingway, some Falkner, Heart of Darkness, Turn of the Screw, Mourning Become Elektra, The Stranger, and I can't remember what else.)

Just don't cry ON the technology, Jesse! That might result in rending of garments.

AH! I just used LJ for good and not evil and bitched and moaned there. Thank god.

We had Brit Lit in 11th grade. And then AP lit where we read all over and all things. I remember arguing with teacher that I would never ever use Twain during the AP exam (she contended any question could be answered with Twain). And lo, during the exam, I used Charlotte Bronte instead. TAKE THAT, SISTER MARY CATHERINE!

Ahem.

I know, though, that things have changed in the 18 years since I was high school (yowch!) and the APs work differently now.

I used Hamlet on the AP exam. I can't remember what the essay was about, though. But our teacher had had us memorize most of the important and quotable passages, so that we'd be able to quote stuff on the essays on the exam. (He'd started that a few years earlier, when a class of his had done way better than average on the exam, and he asked some of them about it, and they pretty much all said that they'd answered the essay question with Midsummer Night's Dream, which had been the drama club production that year, and since most of them were in drama club, they were able to quote it to back up their arguments.)

So I'm watching The Truth About Cancer on PBS, and one thing that is interesting to me is that the "dumbed down" explanation of how non chemo/radiation meds work make total sense to me (the other does too, but it is scorched earth approach) and in fact, I understand beyond the dumbed down version. This is all courtesy of my brother translating his work into layman's terms. His primary focus right now is killing off the mechanism that builds blood vessels that feed the cancer cells in the tumor (via drugs,) but he's gone into other mechanisms explaining it to me.

And that's fucking cool. Biology was my weakest subject, but he's able to convey obscure stuff in such a way that a totally clueless person can understand.

You know how the repetition in some words leads you to repeat the repetition a few too many times? Like banana?

There is a throwaway in one of the Pratchett novels where a character asks how to "stop spelling banana".

Re lettuce in cooking: I'm against soups with lettuce. But if you cook peas, adding a few lettuce leaves to the bottom of the pot improves the flavor for mysterious reasons unknown to me. You use one of the types of lettuce considered "lame" i.e. iceberg, butter lettuce and such: the really bland ones. You throw away the lettuce when the peas are done, and the peas taste sweeter.

Huh.