Moniza's Diary

yay I love my new tumblr. much fodder for guilty, oh so guilty, procrastination. And it's so much prettier than my blog. Anyway, found this on tumblr :

 

I am calling this done because the internet needs it.

Day One: Favorite lead female character
Day Two: Favorite supporting female character
Day Three: A female character you hated but grew to love
Day Four: A female character you relate to
Day Five: Favorite female character on a male-driven show
Day Six: Favorite female-driven show
Day Seven: A female character that needs more screen time
Day Eight: Favorite female character in a comedy show
Day Nine: Favorite female character in a drama show
Day Ten: Favorite female character in a scifi/supernatural show
Day Eleven: Favorite female character in a children’s show
Day Twelve: Favorite female character in a movie
Day Thirteen: Favorite female character in a book
Day Fourteen: Favorite older female character
Day Fifteen: Favorite female character growth arc
Day Sixteen: Favorite mother character
Day Seventeen: Favorite warrior female character
Day Eighteen: Favorite non-warrior female character
Day Nineteen: Favorite non-human female character
Day Twenty: Favorite female antagonist
Day Twenty-One: Favorite female character screwed over by canon
Day Twenty-Two: Favorite female character you love but everyone else hates
Day Twenty-Thre: Favorite female platonic relationship
Day Twenty-Four: Favorite female romantic relationship
Day Twenty-Five: Favorite mother/daughter and/or sister relationship
Day Twenty-Six: Favorite classical female character (from pre-20th century literature or mythology or the like)
Day Twenty-Seven: A female character you have extensive personal canon for
Day Twenty-Eight: Favorite female writer (television, books, movies, etc.)
Day Twenty-Nine:  A female-centric fic rec
Day Thirty: Whatever you’d like!

Argh LOTR is killing me. I know next to nothing about the novels despite having read them very recently. Most of the characters made little or no impact on me. I had the brilliant idea of finding a Tolkien forum and asking proper tolkien fans questions as and when they cropped up, but alas, apparently a proper tolkien forum doesn;t exist. Or at least I couldn;t find one. They are all about specific things like the movies, or a particular scene rather than the books as a whole. I fail. I fail so badly. I stumbled across a weird tolkien roleplaying website but the people there were pretending to be wizards and saying strange things to each other, so I decided not to bother them. 

For someone who can look ridiculousy unattractive and unglam, Kajol cleans up pretty damn well. I like the song but the video's really silly. Kajol is not at her best doing sexy, sensual, lolling about scenes. But she's really cute when there's a proper story because she acts so well.  

I love the first part of this movie. Kajol and SRK make the loveliest romantic pairing. Second only to SRK and Rani Mukherjee. Bollywood is slowly replacing the kajol, rani generation of actresses with skinny perfect-looking actresses with absolutely no talent and even less personality. It's so sad. I can't imagine ever loving the new actresses the way I love kajol and rani. there's something very special about them.

Kajol and srk used to be so adorable together: I bet they're both much older than I am in this video but they look so much younger and fresher than me. I wonder why I look so old and haggard. I feel like youth bypassed me altogether. It would have been nice to have looked young at some point in my life.
 

Srk and rani mukherjee. Cutest video ever:

 

I'm having a very selfish reaction to the earthquake/tsunami. I'm just really glad all the japanese people I know and their families are in Tokyo where the buildings are hardy and built to withstand quakes. Makes the tragedy much less immediate than it easily could have been. But it's terrifying anyway. I can't stop obesessively watching the live footage.

The deathtoll is 137, which is very low for a quake of that magnitude. Japan is really very well-equipped to handle disasters. The buildings in singapore probably wouldn't last five seconds. But then again Japan is very earthquake prone so they should be prepared. I feel awful for the people who lost their loved ones. And there have been extensive damages. Poor japan.

According to Reuters the deathtoll is 300 plus. I wish I had access to a television. So frustrating being stuck in pgp and having to whittle out bits of info from youtube and yahoo news.

My relationship with Tolkien has been a very odd one. I usually fall in love with writers after reading their books, and love them in proportion to the extent to which I love their books. This was definitely not the case with Tolkien. I hate the LOTR books. They bore me senseless. It's an ordeal reading them. Every time a battle crops up I tend to skip the pages. It surprises me Tolkien devoted so much time to battles since he hated warfare. Had a horrible time during wwi, and he coped with it by creating fantasy secondary worlds in the trenches (I really do love Tolkien the man). So given his first hand experiences with war, it does baffle me that he glorifies violence to such a extent in LOTR, with characters horrifyingly competing to see how many orcs they can kill. But I guess Tolkien distances his narrative from the horror of human warfare by refusing to treat the orcs like human creatures. They're associated with violence, machinary, modernity, so in a way in destroying orcs the characters are hacking away at the advance of the very technology that made wwI unbearable for tolkien. Whatever the case, I hate reading about the battles, except for the one in which merry and the ewoyn person (damned if I can ever get any of the names right. It's funny because the main reason LOTR's secondary world is so compelling is because of the consistancy of the names and places, but honestly I've never been good with names, particularly weird long ones, so that's one important aspect of the novels completely lost on me) take down the head ringwraith together.

I like The Hobbit, and I always will like the hobbit because it's not written in the trite, hackneyed high style LOTR is written in. In fact Tolkien only breaks out of that style in LOTR when writing about hobbits because there's something so innately sensible about hobbits that the ridiculous high style can't help but flounder upon coming into contact with them. The only hobbit who enables Tolkien to fall back upon his default high style is Frodo, the only unlikable hobbit, and one who isn't in fact like a hobbit at all but more like an elf. And there are few things in life and fiction I detest as much as I detest elves as characters. Elves as a concept I find fascinating.  There's something very poignant about the merriment of an elf, a merriment mired in sadness because the deathless cannot really live. So yes, I ike the idea of elves but they make for the dullest characters. And I am naturally averse to all things pretty in fiction. I do like Legola though, his contact with Gimli really humanises him.

Anyway, the point of this post is, though I don't actually like the work Tolkien devoted his life to, I love the fact that he did it. And the more I read about the man, and all he has to write about fantasy, fiction and the world he lived in, the more I adore him. He must have been the most wonderful father a person could have. I envy his children with a passion. He wrote them wonderful stories (the hobbit was written for them) lovely long letters and he drew for them. He sounds like the kind of parent I would have designed for myself if parents ciould be designed. I can't imagine having a parent like that. All my mom and dad ever wanted me to do when I was young was math. I had to smuggle storybooks into my room and read them secretly. It was awful. I had to hide the books in my desk drawer with one of those horrible math assessment books open in front of me, so that I could slam the drawer shut in an instant and pretend I was doing math all along. There's a reason why I detest math as much as I do now despite being very good at it as a child. I don't resent my parents though. I am as much of a disappoinment to them as they were to me. I'm sure my dad would have loved a daughter who would have become an engineer like him. But he does his best to love the bizarrely artsy daughters he did in fact get. And I do love my parents for that. My dad is adorable in his own way. he found out it was women's day or something a few days ago and he sent my mom, my sister and I the cutest message about how we are the most important people in his life and apparently he got my mom roses. So cute.

I feel so bad for thesis supervisors. Can't be easy listening to gormless students blathering on about boring ideas, and trying to force some sort of sense out of them. Another unpleasant aspect of the job is the talk they invariably have to have with the student, somewhere around week 8, when it becomes apparent the student doesn't actually have a clue, or a thesis. Susan Ang had the talk with me yesterday, and oddly enough it left me feeling worse for her than I did for myself. She kept telling me not to cry, because poor woman has been cried on by generations of students. And even though she's actually helping the student by telling him or her the essay is not going anywhere, it can't be nice making someone cry. I personally don't understand how anyone could possibly cry in front of a professor. I felt no urge to cry at all during our meeting yesterday, mostly because I was well-aware of the fact that my thesis didn't have a thesis. It was actually a relief to have susan ang confirm what I'd known all along, because it forced me to stop and think for a moment. She gave me until friday to come up with a thesis. Which was great because until I thought of one and she oked it, I couldn't actually write anything! It was like a mental holiday. So I sat down, thought of a thesis, emailed susan ang, and then I went out and had some fun. This morning I checked my email and found out my thesis idea has the susan ang seal of approval! Yay! But also sad my mental holiday lasted only half a day. I got one guilt-free night of clubbing out of it though, so it's all good.